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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%

#111

Post by lubesGordi »

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

This makes sense to me. Where I work our ai team set up a couple h100 cards and are hosting a newer model that uses up around 80GB vram. You can see the gpu utilization on graphana go to like 80% for seconds as it processes a single request. That was very surprising to me. This is $30k worth of hardware that can support only a couple users and maybe only 1 if you have an agent going. Now, maybe we're doing something wrong, but it's hard to imagine anyone is going to make money on hosting billions of dollars of these cards when you're making $20 a month per card. I guess it depends on how active your users are. Hard to imagine anthropic is right side up here.

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

#112

Post by ml-anon »

sumeno wrote: post #105
ryandvm wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has the resources to win AI, but I still don't see a way to resolve the tension between good AI and ad revenue. A useful AI tells me what I need to know, but Google's cash cow is selling users to advertisers. Those are fundamentally oppositional and I don't see a clear way to resolve it. Google can kick ass in AI all day, but soon Gemini is going to be saying shit like, "it sounds like your air conditioner is…

and you think the competitors won't put ads in?

Wtf does “put ads in” mean? Google ads is one of the most sophisticated and profitable machines on the planet. People seem to think it’s as simple as .

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

#113

Post by jart »

neya wrote: post #103
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've been a GCP consultant for close to a decade now. Google messed up big time lagging behind in AI - they just kept increasing prices in other products for about 5 years straight (CDN, for example) and did nothing to productize AI. I'm of the belief that ChatGPT should've been their pilot project. What they have now (AI mode) in Google should've been there well before ChatGPT. But, all that aside, you know what the…

I think App Engine was really ahead of its time in showing how simple cloud deployments can be. It had a similar ease of use as setting up a YouTube account. For that reason, a lot of people thought of it as a toy, which was kind of unfair because companies like Niantic were able to build global products on it. So a lot of Google Cloud afterward ended up being designed to be more "normal" like how Amazon is. Now people are seeing what normal gets them, so maybe it's going to be time for the Google way of doing things to finally shine. (Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee)

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

#114

Post by ml-anon »

BoredPositron wrote: post #59
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…

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

There is literally 0 value in buying Anthropic when they can just sign a sweet deal to license Gemini (or some other model).

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

#116

Post by bmitc »

> engineers who know how to deliver massive systems cost-effectively

Is that true? Google just has an infinite money printing machine and a city's worth of engineers. They don't strike me as a company that fits the description you wrote.

I admit I'm biased at present since they killed off support for the Nests in my house.

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

#117

Post by sigmar »

ryandvm wrote: post #98
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,…

Google has the resources to win AI, but I still don't see a way to resolve the tension between good AI and ad revenue. A useful AI tells me what I need to know, but Google's cash cow is selling users to advertisers. Those are fundamentally oppositional and I don't see a clear way to resolve it. Google can kick ass in AI all day, but soon Gemini is going to be saying shit like, "it sounds like your air conditioner is…

>maybe you should call Clearwater HVAC

Wouldn't one possible solution be just adding a sidebar with ads for products/services relevant to the current topic? They don't need to change the model output to have ads. (Not advocating for ads, just pointing out there's lots of ways to deliver ads)

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

#118

Post by smt88 »

piva00 wrote: post #53
smt88 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is "taking it easy" because of embarrassing ineptitude, not because it's their strategy

It can be both, they're taking it easy meaning they aren't on a hiring spree of "top talent" (like Meta paying 8-9 figures for such) which in turn becomes ineptitude since they aren't betting on it. Even the labour market for the required skills is absurdly overvalued, if they don't see it as a major priority they won't spend the necessary rates for it.

They don't need the hiring spree if they don't train their own models.

They rolled out search without building a search engine and could've done the same with AI.

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

#119

Post by mike_hearn »

lubesGordi wrote: post #111
wslh wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This makes sense to me. Where I work our ai team set up a couple h100 cards and are hosting a newer model that uses up around 80GB vram. You can see the gpu utilization on graphana go to like 80% for seconds as it processes a single request. That was very surprising to me. This is $30k worth of hardware that can support only a couple users and maybe only 1 if you have an agent going. Now, maybe we're doing something…

But was that with batching? It makes a big difference. You can run many requests in parallel on the same card if you're doing LLM inferencing.

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

#120

Post by JustExAWS »

neya wrote: post #103
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've been a GCP consultant for close to a decade now. Google messed up big time lagging behind in AI - they just kept increasing prices in other products for about 5 years straight (CDN, for example) and did nothing to productize AI. I'm of the belief that ChatGPT should've been their pilot project. What they have now (AI mode) in Google should've been there well before ChatGPT. But, all that aside, you know what the…

I am also a cloud consultant focused on AWS and a former employee of AWS ProServe (I have no love lost for the company).

But if you are a consultant, why pray tell are you spending that much time in the console except for occasional monitoring? Everything is either CLI commands or infrastructure as code.

And the issue with Google in particular is their customer support and business enterprise go to market sucks. The sales guys at ProServe use to run circles around GCP and never really took them seriously or had talking points. For big contracts we mostly had to compete with Azure because big boring enterprise was already using Microsoft.

When we did have to compete against GCP - and their sales team didn’t blow up the deal themselves - we just had to say “do you really want to trust Google with your workloads? Look at their history of abandoning products and raising prices”

Apple is a customer of all of the big cloud providers and was on stage at last year’s reinvent.

AWS throws money and people at startups. I’ve been on three sides - working at a 60 person startup who hosted on AWS, working at ProServe and now a third party consulting company where many deals come about because of AWS funding.

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