Ask an AI expert: What exactly is the full stack?

Google is promoting its full-stack approach to artificial intelligence as a way to deliver powerful and cost-efficient products by controlling every layer of the technology, from custom chips to consumer applications, a company executive said [1]. Richard Seroter, who leads developer experience at Google Cloud, described the company's AI platform as "opinionated but extensible" and "batteries included," meaning the necessary components are ready out of the box but can be swapped for third-party alternatives [1]. The strategy spans compute infrastructure, AI models, an orchestration platform, and user interfaces [1]. Google's investment in custom Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, is over 10 years old, a bet Seroter said was made to control the supply chain and raw infrastructure for internet services [1]. Google DeepMind, the company's AI research laboratory formed through a 2023 merger of DeepMind and Google Brain, develops the Gemini family of large language models that power the company's generative AI tools [6]. Gemini was first announced in December 2023 and replaced earlier models such as LaMDA and PaLM 2 [8]. The chatbot, formerly known as Bard, was rebranded to Gemini in February 2024 [8]. The models integrate into Google's ecosystem through a mobile app that functions as an overlay assistant on Android devices and through the Vertex AI platform for third-party developers [8]. Seroter said owning the entire stack provides system reliability because a failure at one layer can be caught and handled at another without waiting for an external provider [1]. He also cited an economic advantage, stating that customers do not absorb fees from third-party vendors, allowing competitive pricing [1]. The company aims to make technology accessible to "billions of people who don't have an engineering degree" [1]. The broader AI landscape has seen rapid investment and public attention since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022 [2]. The chatbot reached 100 million monthly active users within two months and 900 million weekly active users by February 2026 [2]. Google's Gemini has drawn technical praise for its benchmarks in coding and retrieval tasks, though the product launch faced criticism after the company suspended the model's ability to generate images of people due to historical inaccuracies and bias [8]. Subsequent updates throughout 2025 focused on reducing hallucinations and improving agentic capabilities for autonomous research and software development [8]. Seroter recommended three starting points for builders: Google AI Studio for rapid web application prototypes, the Gemini Enterprise Platform for low-code workflow automation, and the Antigravity platform for complex application or agent builds [1].