Shares of Alphabet having a very good week. All-time highs today, up 10% since Monday,

and those record highs coming as the company announced new updates to the AI model Gemini and Search.

Deirda Durbos has been watching this story pretty much all week, Dee.

All week. It's been a busy one. And really the takeaway is that a new race has emerged in generative AI,

and Google's distribution advantage that is king if it can navigate its regulatory minefield.

Now, over the last few years, the race in AI has been all about the large language models like

GPT, Gemini, Claude, Lama, and access to GPUs.

But as those models have become commoditized and advancements themselves may be losing momentum,

the big players are looking to this next phase, and that is getting AI applications into

users' hands.

That is what Google's announcement this morning was all about.

As important as the improvements it told us about in Gemini, it will get new capabilities

like reasoning into the hands of a billion users that are accessing AI overviews through

traditional search. Contrast that to OpenAI's 12 days of Shipmiss, where it released a full version

of its O1 reasoning model to a far smaller group of users. But what Open AI does have now is Apple's distribution through the Apple Intelligence,

ChatGBTGBT integration, which went live this morning.

So Google and Apple, they're essentially the gatekeepers in this next leg, but that status,

especially for Google, is under intense scrutiny by regulators and it could be threatened.

Following that landmark ruling in the Google DOJ search monopoly case, the DOJ is asking for remedies that go beyond search

and could very well hurt Google's advantage in generative AI, like breaking off Chrome and data sharing requirements.

Now, another battle taking place in the agentic or the application phase may be the licensing

agreements of the previous era, the information reporting that Google has asked the FTC to break

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