Claude 3.5 is much newer, not really a fair comparison. Google has the benefit of a huge client base, including enterprises. They can integrate Gemini into their other offerings, which OpenAI / Anthropic cannot.
Largest context window (because of most compute) wins.
They've got more serious engineering heavyweights, putting a lot of collective work on fewer tasks/approaches. Microsoft is taking more of a kitchen sink approach
If that was going to make the difference, why is ChatGPT way more popular today than Gemini? Why isn't Google already ahead of their competitors? Google ahead? I'll believe it when I see it.
Google are in the race for sure, but they aren't winning. Claude holds that crown for me at the moment. The artifacts feature is wonderful.