> "By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search but AI."
Nah. Not by any common-sense measure at least. i.e. not if you ask a person on the street "what is Google's main product?", not if you look at where their revenue comes from. Perhaps if you look at where their staffing/spending/attention is going, but I don't think it's fair to say AI is their "main product" yet. (disclaimer: I work there, not directly on AI)
> "oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences"
Directionally, yes. The number is too low, though, at least for now. As someone not even super closely following everything, I can rattle off more than 2 or 3. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, Meta, Microsoft, DeepSeek + other Chinese players... Probably in the eyes of the public it really is just 2 or 3 (ChatGPT + something from work, perhaps).
> "The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services"
Yeah.
> "The bulk of AI will be special purpose software brains"
Feels underspecified... I'd say this is a miss. "most of the commercial work completed by AI will be done by nonhuman-like programs" Most by what measure? Most invocations/day? Most users? Most economic output? Most public awareness? "AI" or "ML" in one form or another is ubiquitous and indeed if you were to make a giant list of "AI" or "ML" applications it would probably be dominated by hyper-specialized non-human examples, e.g. the image processing in your phone's camera, your Spotify recommendation algo, image recognition on factory floors. But in the public consciousness, the term "AI" means know-everything, do-everything human-like chat/assistant systems.
> "in conversational tones, any question at all"
Yeah.