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Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

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Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#81

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

hypeatei wrote: post #47
shubhamjain wrote: post #31

This is one of the reasons I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. For all its breakthroughs, OpenAI lacks any fiscal discipline. Sam Altman seems convinced that as long as they’re delivering value and have a clear mission, the money will somehow take care of itself. That’s fine for now, but the music will stop playing one day. When it comes to software engineering at scale,…

I hold the exact same sentiment. The safest investment you can make in this AI race is Alphabet. The smaller players being wrapped up in this (CRWV, NOK, etc...) are going to get obliterated when the returns are not as good as previously thought. The bigger players will take a hit, but not as much as the small ones. NVIDIA also seems like a risky bet given all the money they're passing around in circles to themselves…

If you look back at the dot com era, hardware companies did survive but weren't the financial "winners". Cisco is an example and a good comparison is Amazon - their bread and butter now is ecommerce, they dominate it and that was borne out of that bubble.

Alphabet also has massive market share with YouTube, solid cloud offerings, Waymo which already has driverless/unsupervised robot taxis and their old standby search which is morphing more into more AI answers when you throw questions in your browser.

Alphabet's P/E ratio is lower than the S&P 500's. Some may argue the S&P is mostly being held up by Tech and AI related companies so stock in Alphabet could be seen as undervalued and NVDIA as overvalued.

Hardware almost always ends up getting commoditized so investing in hardware companies for the long haul does carry maybe more risk than mainly software companies.

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#82

Post by noir_lord »

chii wrote: post #13
tomaytotomato wrote: post #11

There was a blog post on here the other day about moving back to bare metal hosting with practical explanations and problem solving. Cloud is great but its just borrowing someone else's machine for a fee. It's like a hyper-scalable and granular mainframe but like all mainframes, the client is powerless without it. We need to get our acts together and not allow ourselves to be smothered in silicon nimbus (clouds) and…

> Yes it takes time to manage and get up to speed, but that's empowering right....? I rather not, but instead these compute clouds should be treated similarly to utilities - you don't really want to be running your own generators for electricity do you? So why is it that we can setup utilities properly, where everybody can trust that it stays on and usable for a price low enough? My theory is that vendor lock in is t…

Seems kinda obvious why they wouldn’t want to be a commodity.

It’d lead to direct comparisons between clouds (as someone who had estimated moving legacy work loads it’s a shit load of work to get a reasonable “drive away” price for one of them and the work is duplicated to do it for the other).

If they are truly commodities then than goes away as does their margins to large degree - none of them want that.

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#83

Post by jasode »

shubhamjain wrote: post #31

This is one of the reasons I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. For all its breakthroughs, OpenAI lacks any fiscal discipline. Sam Altman seems convinced that as long as they’re delivering value and have a clear mission, the money will somehow take care of itself. That’s fine for now, but the music will stop playing one day. When it comes to software engineering at scale,…

>I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry.

Your mention of "VC funding" may be a placeholder for conversational purposes but just to clarify, OpenAI is way beyond the small pocketbooks of typical Venture Capitalists. They have investments from huge sovereign wealth funds (e.g. billions from Middle East oil funds) and trillion-dollar corporations like NVIDIA, Microsoft, AMD, etc.

In other words, OpenAI has embedded itself into the money and tech ecosystem much more deeply than the dotcom failed startup Webvan burning through the limited cash of Sequoia VC.

There are lots of heavily funded vested interests that don't want to see Google be the ultimate winner (or only winner).

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#84

Post by jonfw »

CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #57
r_lee wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CLI also takes like 5 seconds to do anything

It surprises me that it's built in Python (as is AWS'), which doesn't seem like a very appropriate language for exactly this reason. Go would seem much more apposite.

These CLIs are just thin request clients a la curl. The code execution time is peanuts in comparison to the request latency

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#85

Post by dangus »

whynotminot wrote: post #62
BoredPositron wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that easy. Tim is probably rubbing his hands until he can bring anthropic under the apple umbrella.

Might have missed the boat on that. It’s everyone’s wet dream that Apple buys Anthropic, but I’m guessing their valuation now is already too high even for Apple. And why would Amazon let that happen? It’s a solid match but not happening unless the AI market craters and Apple swoops in to buy them for vastly less.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple eventually decides that AI isn’t even a market worth existing in beyond some basic on-device tools.

They might say, have fun making single digit or negative profit margins on AI, we’ll sell subscriptions and iPhones and extended warranties.

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#86

Post by thelastgallon »

jasode wrote: post #83
shubhamjain wrote: post #31

This is one of the reasons I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. For all its breakthroughs, OpenAI lacks any fiscal discipline. Sam Altman seems convinced that as long as they’re delivering value and have a clear mission, the money will somehow take care of itself. That’s fine for now, but the music will stop playing one day. When it comes to software engineering at scale,…

>I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. Your mention of "VC funding" may be a placeholder for conversational purposes but just to clarify, OpenAI is way beyond the small pocketbooks of typical Venture Capitalists. They have investments from huge sovereign wealth funds (e.g. billions from Middle East oil funds) and trillion-dollar corporations like NVIDIA, Microsoft, AMD, et…

So did wework. Didn't stop it from going under. Some financial truths are like shouting at gravity.

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#87

Post by sjs382 »

hypeatei wrote: post #47
shubhamjain wrote: post #31

This is one of the reasons I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. For all its breakthroughs, OpenAI lacks any fiscal discipline. Sam Altman seems convinced that as long as they’re delivering value and have a clear mission, the money will somehow take care of itself. That’s fine for now, but the music will stop playing one day. When it comes to software engineering at scale,…

I hold the exact same sentiment. The safest investment you can make in this AI race is Alphabet. The smaller players being wrapped up in this (CRWV, NOK, etc...) are going to get obliterated when the returns are not as good as previously thought. The bigger players will take a hit, but not as much as the small ones. NVIDIA also seems like a risky bet given all the money they're passing around in circles to themselves…

> The safest investment you can make in this AI race is Alphabet.

From the technical/talent/funding side, I agree with you. With Alphabet, the real risk is that they lose interest/focus and kill (or pivot) products early. I don't really see that happening in the short term (considering the hype/investments/cash around AI) but maybe in the medium to long term if things start to get stale.

Even with that risk though, I agree with you.

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#88

Post by jillesvangurp »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #68
mg wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One approach to prevent being hit by "stack rot" is to build everything on top of plain Linux VMs. Those rarely change.

Unfortunately the software deployed on top of them will. So you either: 1) postpone all your updates for years until a bad CVE hits and you need to update or some application goes end of life and you’re screwed because updating becomes a massive exercise 2) do regular updates and patches to the entire stack, including Linux, in which case, you’re in the same position you were before with running on the stack rot trea…

My rationale for staying up to date aggressively is that it minimizes integration work. Basically integration work multiplies, it doesn't just accumulate. So the further you fall behind the more that can break when you finally do upgrade. And you create needlessly more work related to testing and fixing all that. Upgrading a system that was fully up to date until a few days/weeks ago is generally easy. There's only so much that changes. Doing the same to something that was last touched five years ago can be a bit painful. Apis that no longer exist. Components that are no longer supported. Code that no longer compiles. Etc.

I see a lot of teams being overly conservative with keeping their stuff up to date running with years out of date stuff with lots of known & fixed bugs of all varieties, performance issues that have long since been addressed, etc. All in the name of stability.

I treat anything that isn't up to date as technical debt. If an update breaks stuff, I need to know so I can either deal with it or document a work around or a (usually temporary) version rollback. While that happens, it doesn't happen a lot. And I prefer knowing about these things because I've tried it over being ignorant of the breakage because I haven't updated anything in years. It just adds to the hidden pile of technical debt you don't even know you have. Ignorance is not an excuse for not dealing with your technical debt. Or worse compounding it by building on top of it and creating more technical debt in the process.

Dealing with small changes over time is a lot less work than with dealing with a large delta all at once. It's something I've been doing for years. If I work on any of my projects, the first thing I do is update dependencies. Make sure stuff still works (tests). Make sure deprecated APIs are dealt with.

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#89

Post by Insanity »

embedding-shape wrote: post #34
refulgentis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is a strategy employed to slow down development at other companies, and so help preserve the moat. Worked at Google for 7 years, and your post reminds me it is time to share a secret: it is Koyaanisqatsi* and people's base instincts unbridled, no more. There is no quicker route to irrelevancy than being the person who cares about something from last years OKRs. * to be clear, s/Koyaanisqatsi/too big to exist hea…

If it's so obvious, and Google supposedly know this internally, and can obviously tell by others that some are avoiding Google because they're fast at sunsetting services, why are they not doing anything about it?

Because it’s not meaningfully hurting their bottom line.

Re: Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%

#90

Post by sjs382 »

wslh wrote: post #58
hypeatei wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hold the exact same sentiment. The safest investment you can make in this AI race is Alphabet. The smaller players being wrapped up in this (CRWV, NOK, etc...) are going to get obliterated when the returns are not as good as previously thought. The bigger players will take a hit, but not as much as the small ones. NVIDIA also seems like a risky bet given all the money they're passing around in circles to themselves…

NVIDIA also seems like a risky bet because Google has their own chips R&D. It's not just another data center buying NVIDIA's GPUs. BTW Apple is following suit regarding chips, don't know if at some point Apple will offer any cloud service or continue to work on their ecosystem only. Beyond that there are a lot of new chip companies attacking the market: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45686790

While Google has their own chips, they don't really have the market power there to buy up bleeding-edge manufacturing capacity.

Apple on the other hand... (though they're behind in other regards)

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