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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%

#161

Post by keeda »

jart wrote: post #113
neya wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peop…

App Engine was the OG serverless before "serverless" was even a term:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s...

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

#162

Post by keeda »

fidotron wrote: post #5
RedShift1 wrote: post #2

We use GCP at work, it works well for what we use it (VMs, container storage, cloud file storage), I wish they would stop deprecating stuff though, it just causes developer busy work with no additional value.

> it just causes developer busy work with no additional value. Anyone remotely familiar with Google as a third party developer will notice the pattern: this will ramp up until it is almost your entire job simply dealing with their changes, most of which will be not-quite-actual-fixes to their previous round of changes. This is not unique to Google, but it is a strategy employed to slow down development at other compa…

I used to think that made sense (as sibling mentions, Spolsky's "fire and motion" thesis)... until I worked at large-ish tech company whose internal platforms also kept doing this. Heck, the platform I owned also underwent a couple cycles of this. And so a large part of our work was just doing the Red Queen's race of deprecations and migrations.

So it was definitely not "fire and motion," as there was no competition. I think platforms genuinely need to evolve as new use-cases onboard and technology progresses, and so the assumptions underpinning the platform's design and architecture no longer hold.

However, I do think a small part of the problem was also PDD: "Promotion Driven Development."

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

#163

Post by rstuart4133 »

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 can kick ass in AI all day, but soon Gemini is going to be saying shit like, "it sounds like your air conditioner is broken, maybe you should call Clearwater HVAC - they're the best!"

That is the nightmare scenario. The puzzle for me is why you apparently think it just a trap for Google. All of the pure AI companies are burning cash. That is going to stop. Either they go broke, or they do something with ads.

There is a third option I guess, and that is they create something that is useful enough to be worth paying for. It won't be just an LLM, but as far as I can tell they are all just fine tuning LLM's. We already know what the limits of an LLM are, as we are already there.

All except Google that is, who are building AI's for all sorts of things, such as protein folding, weather prediction and driving cars. LLM's were their invention, created by them for doing translation and OCR. And unlike everyone else, they aren't dependent on NVidia as they use their own internally developed hardware. Surely there is no argument about Google being the world's power house of AI?? Most of these efforts will be experiments Google is infamous for abandoning. But it's seems likely one or two will become the youtubes of AI.

I can't see anything remotely comparable from the other AI companies. It's difficult to see how this doesn't end with Google completely dominating the space, and all these LLM companies going broke.

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

#164

Post by keeda »

thelastgallon wrote: post #86
jasode wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Wework's CEO was not hobnobbing with the leaders of sovereign nations.

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

#165

Post by VirusNewbie »

garbthetill wrote: post #100
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,…

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…

You honestly think talent is going to xAI? Why do neither of these companies have a SoTA model?

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

#166

Post by xtracto »

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…

Do you define "AI" as LLMs?

I ask, because earlier this year I had the chance to use a Waymo for the first time. I moved a good chunk of my portfolio to GOOG after that.

To me, Waymo felt like either Magic or stepping 15+ years into the future; Demolition Man stuff (im a child of the 80s, Xenial).

Stuff like Waymo, AlphaFold and similar are just so far away from anybody else, that Alphabet could split in several companies and all of them would be hugely dominant in the future. And none of them base their revenue in advertising.

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

#167

Post by tsoukase »

By some napkin calc, Google has some billions of customers globally and about low hundred billions annual net income, so makes about 15-20$ per user.

With Google I enjoy free full web service coverage (search, mail and the other popular products), a huge video site, a phone ecosystem and now AI, which otherwise would cost me hundreds of dollars in subscriptions. Let advertisers and paying developers subsidise this free web service world offer (and by ad blocking you avoid "being the product").

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

#168

Post by ac29 »

sjs382 wrote: post #159
Jcowell wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company can be multiple things. Just like Apple is a Phone, Tablet, & General Computing Company

Agreed, but there's no denying that selling advertising is Google/Alphabet's primary business. And it's not even close.

Its the majority of their revenue, but the share is shrinking

Revenue attributable to advertising:

Q1: 74.1%

Q2: 74.0%

Q3: 72.5%

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

#169

Post by acdha »

overfeed wrote: post #154
acdha wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The root comment was investor-centric, i.e. if you want to divert some investment towards AI, Alphabet is a smart bet. Investors got great returns as Google churned messaging platforms, and this will likely be the case ad Google churns through AI products, or even entire architectures.

We did get good returns but that was because other units did very well. It’s not a given but still too likely that they’d botch AI products but still be profitable due to ad sales continuing to grow. I do think AI has better than average chances, though, because it seems to have scared their senior management enough to do their jobs: from outside, everything appears to radiate “this can’t fail” in a way they haven’t had since the 2000s.
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