Scope of "more than"
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"The hottest new AI company is…Google?", CNN 11/29/2025, shows a slide telling us that Google Search is "Bringing Generative AI to more people than any product in the world":
Jonathan Smith, who sent in the link, commented
"to more people than our competitors" yes, "to more people than there are fish in the sea" yes, "to more people than e.g. potable water [is brought]" really…?
The syntax and semantics of "more than" constructions are complicated, in ways that sometimes lead to Escher Sentences.
I collected a sample of real-world sentences illustrating various corners of Jonathan's question, but I think I'll leave this one open for readers to explore.
Michael Watts said,
December 1, 2025 @ 4:51 am
The sentence seems fine as is. Google Search is characterized as bringing generative AI to more people than any [other] product in the world brings generative AI to. Which is Jonathan Smith's first pretend interpretation, "to more people than our competitors", except it's not a joke. Why is this supposed to be weird?
Philip Anderson said,
December 1, 2025 @ 6:51 am
I agree with Michael; other product” might be better, except they are probably implying that Google Search is not a mere “product” but something more, and a final bringing/doing is understood at the end.
David Beckman said,
December 1, 2025 @ 7:24 am
Yes, that's how I too automatically interpreted the sentence: "bringing generative AI to more people than any [other AI] product in the world." That said, if I were, say, copyediting an article that had this sentence, I would probably notice it as being awkward or potentially confusing to a general reader and add the words I've inserted there.
Chris Button said,
December 1, 2025 @ 7:48 am
Courtesy of the Chicago Manual of Style:
"My sister looks more like our father than I (do)"
"Mu sister looks more like our father than (she looks like) me"
Stephen Goranson said,
December 1, 2025 @ 8:35 am
That's what I'd prefer, Michael Watts, the stated "other." But such use seems fading.
Philip Taylor said,
December 1, 2025 @ 9:27 am
I suspect that the idea in the slide author's mind was "Google Search is bringing Generative AI to more people than any (similiar or analogous) product in the world" but he was over-ruled by GHA ("Google Higher Authorities") who told him, in no uncertain terms, "there are no "similar or analogous" products to Google Search — all that exist are pathetic imitators which are not even worthy of comparison.
Mark Liberman said,
December 1, 2025 @ 10:57 am
I'll let Jonathan answer for himself, but I think all the commenters have missed his point. In
X1 is bringing X2 to more X3 than Y
Y = "our competitors" substitutes for X1, and that works — it's what "any other product" also does.
Y = "there are fish in the sea" substitutes for X3, and that works,
Y= "potable water" wants to substitute for X2, but that doesn't really work.
At least I think that's what he was getting at.
Gregory Kusnick said,
December 1, 2025 @ 11:33 am
If Jonathan thinks that "any product" is meant to substitute for "Generative AI", then I think he's misunderstood the slide. My reading (and apparently that of other commenters) is that "any product" substitutes for "Google Search". So the "potable water" example is simply not relevant.
Jonathan Smith said,
December 1, 2025 @ 5:03 pm
Haha I'll be damned, "any product in the world" = plain old Type 1 "our competitors' similar Generative AI tools." I can still barely grok it… maybe because "any product in the world" strikes me as comically large in scope to mean merely "Microsoft CoPilot, ChatGPT, and similar." Or maybe "product" is a hair nerdview? Or some combo…
Anyway that's why I was fishing for a Type 3 interpretation, which is needless to say dubious for the above case but I think generally OK wrt scope, so —
"we bring widgets to more people than any [other] product" = check, I think…
Joe said,
December 1, 2025 @ 5:34 pm
The reason I misparsed it on my first reading is because of graphic design. The Google Search logo isn't part of the slogan, smaller and I'm a different color, so I ignored it, and when I looked for the "product" that's being compared with all others in the world, the only one I found was "Generative AI". After I'd locked in with genAI as the product, it was hard for me to reparse with Google Search as the product, because now I was thinking of a product as a generic category of thing, like potable water, and Google Search read as more of a "platform" that supplies the thing, like Dasani vending machines.
Jason Stokes said,
December 1, 2025 @ 10:21 pm
Obviously, they let generative AI write the slides.
Stephen Goranson said,
December 2, 2025 @ 7:41 am
Misunderstanding the amphibolous (?) sentence–as I may well have done–might still, even after analysis, leave a question of precisely what was intended and by whom.
Xtifr said,
December 2, 2025 @ 3:09 pm
I think "other products" would be wrong. It's well-known that Google's product is eyeballs (for its advertising clients). Search is just the bait it uses to catch those elusive eyeballs!
That said, I do see three ways to parse the sentence, which I'll present in the order I spotted them:
1. X [is] bringing Y to more people than any Z [is bringing].
2. X [is] bringing Y to more people than [it is bringing] any Z [to].
3. X [is] bringing Y to more people than any Z [is being brought to (by other unspecified means)].
That last one took me a long time to find, and I'm a bit boggled to think something so awkward might have been anyone's default parsing. Am I missing something? Is there a less awkward way to present that? Or a fourth parsing that I'm still missing?
Adrian Bailey said,
December 5, 2025 @ 11:40 am
"any other product" seems so much better here. "any product in the world" sounds like it was written by a 10-year-old.
unekdoud said,
December 7, 2025 @ 10:33 am
To rewrite this again: replace "any product in the world" with Product X, and there's two things being said here: Google [Search] brings generative AI to a number of people, and that number would be reduced in the case of (1) Google replaced by Product X, (2) Generative AI replaced by Product X, or (3) People replaced by instances of Product X.
While we're searching for wrong parses, in an alternative universe I might accept (4) "Bringing" replaced by "X-ing", where Bringing is already a verbed form of some kind of delivery service.
There is also a question of the scope of "in the world" which can apply to each noun, but that's splitting hairs in this case.
I could also imagine a confusion of "more to" versus "to more". Instead of "a number of people" above, read "to an extent, people".