The Electricity - Manas Bihani

Manas Bihani

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The Electricity<br>Why Google may be trying to make intelligence disappear.

Manas Bihani<br>Jul 04, 2026

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In 1998, two Stanford PhD students wrote a paper about how to rank web pages, and the entire internet reorganized itself around the answer. You know how that one ended. The two kids were Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the paper was PageRank, and the company they built off it spent the next twenty-five years being the toll booth every road on the internet ran through.

In 2017, eight researchers wrote another paper. It was called “Attention Is All You Need,” and it introduced the transformer the thing underneath ChatGPT, underneath Claude, underneath every model that got a magazine cover for supposedly being the Google killer. Here’s the punchline. Those eight researchers worked at Google.<br>Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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Sit with that for a second, because everyone breezes past it. Google published the founding document of its own disruption, put it on the internet for free, and then watched a startup in San Francisco read its homework and nearly steal the crown with it.<br>Now. If you invented the bomb, handed it to the guy across the street, and watched him aim it at your house, how would you feel?<br>Furious, right? You’d learn your lesson. You’d never give away the paper again. You’d lock the lab, patent everything, sue somebody.<br>Google’s response looks like the opposite. And that response, a company nearly disrupted by its own invention answering by giving away even more is the whole story. It’s the tell. It’s the thing that suggests Google is playing a different game than most of the industry, and a lot of people cheering the stock haven’t noticed which game.<br>Let me show you the game.

In early 2023, it looked like Google had fumbled the future. Bard hallucinated in its own launch demo, and Alphabet lost about $100 billion in market value in a single day. Kodak with better logos. For about a week, half of Silicon Valley published some version of that obituary.<br>Hold onto Bard. We’re coming back to him.<br>Because in hindsight, that moment says more about what everyone was measuring than about what Google was building. Everyone was grading a chatbot. Google was increasingly behaving as though the chatbot wasn’t the thing worth winning.<br>What if the whole industry was watching the wrong game?

Here’s the game everyone thinks they’re watching.

There’s a race. The prize is the smartest model. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, a rotating cast of Chinese labs, all sprinting, and every few months somebody posts a benchmark score and the tech press treats it like a Game. A model climbs three spots on a leaderboard and it’s a headline. Drops two points on a reasoning test and by dinner someone’s declared the moat dead.<br>Everyone agreed, with total confidence, on the rules. Ship the smartest model, win. That’s the whole theory. Nobody interrogated it, because it’s the obvious read, and the obvious read is usually right.<br>So watch what Google does, if that’s really the game.<br>It gives away Gemma a genuinely good model free, to any nine-person startup that wants to go build a competitor with it. It publishes compression research that teaches the whole world how to run Google-quality models on cheaper hardware, meaning less need for Google’s own cloud. Then it ships Gemini Nano straight into Android, so the model runs on your phone, where Google can’t meter it, can’t bill for it, can’t own the moment.<br>Three moves. All in the same direction. All insane if the model is the prize.<br>You do not hand the vault key to strangers when you’re racing to own what’s in the vault.<br>Unless you were never racing for what’s in the vault.<br>Here’s the sentence the whole thing hinges on, and I want you to feel the weight of it:<br>Gemini isn’t the product. It’s the electricity.

Now hold on. Before you go repeat that at a dinner party it’s not quite right, and the part that’s wrong is the part that matters.<br>Electricity is dumb. A grid doesn’t get smarter because more toasters plug in. The kilowatt that hit your coffee maker this morning learned nothing about how you take your coffee.<br>Google’s grid learns.<br>Every search sharpens the ranking. Every wrong guess the model makes on your phone teaches it to guess better. Every doc in Workspace, every route in Maps none of it dead-ends. It flows back in. Imagine a power grid where every toaster quietly reported how it liked its toast, and next winter the electricity itself showed up better suited to bread.<br>That’s not a grid. That’s a grid with a nervous system.

So if the model was never the prize what is?<br>You win the way a utility wins. Own the grid. Then get somebody else to help pay for the power.

Google moved the meter onto your phone. When Nano runs on-device, the compute drains your battery, not Google’s data center. Google’s own docs say the quiet part out loud: on-device inference...