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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%

#101

Post by martythemaniak »

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…

There is no way for anyone to resolve it, you'll either be paying premium, running last gen stuff locally, or getting ads, regardless of whether you use Google, OpenAI or anyone else.

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

#102

Post by pu_pe »

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,…

Wouldn't this same logic apply to IBM back in its heyday?

The biggest risk for Google is that it is already a behemoth and it has lost a lot of what made it so special. I also think they have a huge conflict of interest when it comes to AI, because it is a threat to their core business.

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

#103

Post by neya »

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 they're really good at? Google Cloud. I'm a user of all the major Cloud providers and nothing beats GCP's interface. Azure? Complicated, buggy and unreliable. There's some exploit every quarter. AWS? Overly complex security policies even to deploy a basic app, very enterprise focused and startup-unfriendly. GCP - you can be up and running on a serverless/VM instance in your lunch break. Simple, reliable, scales effortlessly. We serve 10M+ visitors on there and we've had zero issues in the last half a decade with them.

They suck at a lot of other things and they have a lot of other problems. But boy, are they good at Cloud. No wonder even Apple is their customer. It's one of the few products from Google where you can say "it just works".

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

#104

Post by CamouflagedKiwi »

jonfw wrote: post #84
CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not negligible versus a single request. Even `gcloud --help` takes over a second on this machine - actually getting it to do a simple list request takes almost no time longer over any reasonable connection.

Plus Python is notoriously not easy to deploy for - a Go (or Rust or whatever) binary would have almost no dependencies to worry about.

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

#105

Post by sumeno »

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…

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

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

#106

Post by seneca »

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.

The execution speed of the language the CLI is written in doesn't matter. Any difference is dwarfed by the slowness of network calls, specifically their API response times.

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

#107

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

Google will win AI as far as the most profitable for the same reason that Apple keeps winning the cell phone market - again profits not market share - vertical integration.

Google has the best infrastructure, its own chips TPUs and a huge customer base. Ben Thompson (Stratechery) and Horace Deidi (Asymco) have referenced Clay’s “Innovator’s Dilemma” about the difference between a disruptive technology and a sustaining technology.

AI is going to help BigTech that exists today get bigger.

The cloud providers - AWS, Google and Microsoft - are just exposing models as just another API to their existing customers. Google added AI overviews and an AI tab. Even Apple is going to come out ahead because developers who want local (free) inference can depend on iPhones to have decent hardware and local models.

Facebook is using AI for better ad targeting.

Where does that leave OpenAI? It’s been said plenty of times that no one is going to care about their models that are a commodity and they could put any decent model behind ChatGPT and it would be just as popular.

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

#108

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

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…

They have an entire cloud division and they just announced it grew by 33%

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

#109

Post by film42 »

skywhopper wrote: post #73

“Over 70% of existing Google Cloud customers use its AI products, Pichai said.” That’s not by choice, of course. It’s difficult-to-impossible to turn off.

AKA... 70% of existing google cloud users have filled out a support ticket, which starts with a chat bot.

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

#110

Post by ml-anon »

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…

Google is literally, today, making money from AI. Not only that but the presence of competing AI services has resulted only in record revenue and straight quarters of ad revenue growth since ChatGPT was launched.
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