Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 179 posts

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

#141

Post by acdha »

overfeed wrote: post #131
sjs382 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The chances of Alphabet losing interest in AI are vanishingly small. Google (pre-Alphabet remaming) was the AI company before AI companies were called that.

They didn’t lose interest in messaging when they cycled through half a dozen different apps but the problem was they were building products they wanted to exist rather than what users wanted. I’d worry about AI getting similar churn if PMs make their name by launching a new product rather than improving an existing one.

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

#142

Post by sumeno »

ml-anon wrote: post #112
sumeno wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

The competitors will either figure it out or run out of money and collapse (or, both)

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

#143

Post by nycdatasci »

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,…

"When it comes to software engineering at scale, nothing beats Google"

I agree with many of your statements, but this one simply isn't true. They've really struggled to integrate AI into products in a useful way. Do you remember glue on pizza? Founding Fathers reimagined for DEI? The Brain/DeepMind merger was largely an acknowledgement of their many misses from a product perspective.

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

#144

Post by tim333 »

nycdatasci wrote: post #143
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,…

"When it comes to software engineering at scale, nothing beats Google" I agree with many of your statements, but this one simply isn't true. They've really struggled to integrate AI into products in a useful way. Do you remember glue on pizza? Founding Fathers reimagined for DEI? The Brain/DeepMind merger was largely an acknowledgement of their many misses from a product perspective.

The pizza glue and DEI stuff were temporary glitches on new products. Their basic engineering on search, gmail etc is pretty solid.

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

#145

Post by sjs382 »

overfeed wrote: post #131
sjs382 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The chances of Alphabet losing interest in AI are vanishingly small. Google (pre-Alphabet remaming) was the AI company before AI companies were called that.

> Google (pre-Alphabet renaming) was the AI company before AI companies were called that.

I disagree. They're an advertising/attention company.

The jury's still out on whether their AI offerings will compliment their existing business or will cannibalize it. And in the case that it cannibalizes the advertising business, will they undermine/kneecap it to protect that cash cow?

It's been a while since they've been the "don't be evil" and "organizing the world's information"-mission Google.

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

#146

Post by tim333 »

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…

I presume they will do what they have done successfully for the last decade or two and separate the recommendations from the ads. So you'll have gemini saying unbiasedly what it thinks and then a separate "sponsored" bit say "Buy Clearwater!"

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

#147

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

rightbyte wrote: post #139
garbthetill wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

idk google is so flaky, one must not forget that they had the llm concept first and couldnt really materialize it into anything commercial until chat gpt came around. Google often could dominate a market, yet they kill the product/tech instead of keeping a small team to maintain it. I think the winner will be between xai or meta, im leaning more with xai since elon seems to always have 100% conviction even with seemi…

> they had the llm concept first and couldnt really materialize it into anything commercial until chat gpt came around. Wasn't the "fuzzy search" that ignored keywords run by some sort of LLM? I.e. "lady gaga age" would return documents with "lady gaga old" etc.

> Wasn't the "fuzzy search" that ignored keywords run by some sort of LLM? I.e. "lady gaga age" would return documents with "lady gaga old" etc.

That was embeddings AFAIK, so yeah, similar technology to LLMs.

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

#148

Post by _DeadFred_ »

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's new AI voice assistant finally seems to reliably set timers. The problem is they released it what, a year ago? And during that time it didn't and I now no longer trust the AI on my phone to do tasks. Google themselves trained me not to trust their AI tools.

Youtube (Google) currently degrades my feed because when I block AI videos, they assume I dislike the related topic. They have made it either I love AI videos/music, or they punish me.

You are right, they have stakeholders causing inertia to protect their fiefdoms across a large range of products. You are right, they have (profitable) current products which will prove to be barriers to nimble, future, nearterm non-profitable products. I'm not sure that's a strength seeing how they have responded so far.

They are too big and too slow to adapt. They have too many people with interests in protecting their (legacy) niche, too much inertia to overcome. The classic signs of a zombie company. Going purely off their ability to adapt in the last year, they are dead and don't even know it yet.

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

#149

Post by _DeadFred_ »

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…

Man I remember when IBM was the safe bet.

I remember when SCO had an all hands meeting that they evaluated that linux wasn't a threat because SCO was the safe choice, the big player in UNIX on commodity hardware.

I don't think tech works that way.

Post reply on HN