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Google is winning on every AI front

(www.thealgorithmicbridge.com)
993 points vinhnx | 3 comments | 12 Apr 25 03:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.241s | source
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thunderbird120 ◴[12 Apr 25 06:13 UTC] No.43661807[source]▶
This article doesn't mention TPUs anywhere. I don't think it's obvious for people outside of google's ecosystem just how extraordinarily good the JAX + TPU ecosystem is. Google several structural advantages over other major players, but the largest one is that they roll their own compute solution which is actually very mature and competitive. TPUs are extremely good at both training and inference[1] especially at scale. Google's ability to tailor their mature hardware to exactly what they need gives them a massive leg up on competition. AI companies fundamentally have to answer the question "what can you do that no one else can?". Google's hardware advantage provides an actual answer to that question which can't be erased the next time someone drops a new model onto huggingface.

[1]https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/ironwood-tpu-age-o...

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noosphr ◴[12 Apr 25 06:29 UTC] No.43661870[source]▶
And yet google's main structural disadvantage is being google.

Modern BERT with the extended context has solved natural language web search. I mean it as no exaggeration that _everything_ google does for search is now obsolete. The only reason why google search isn't dead yet is that it takes a while to index all web paged into a vector database.

And yet it wasn't google that released the architecture update, it was hugging face as a summer collaboration between a dozen people. Google's version came out in 2018 and languished for a decade because it would destroy their business model.

Google is too risk averse to do anything, but completely doomed if they don't cannibalize their cash cow product. Web search is no longer a crown jewel, but plumbing that answering services, like perplexity, need. I don't see google being able to pull off an iPhone moment where they killed the iPod to win the next 20 years.

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1. dash2 ◴[12 Apr 25 07:14 UTC] No.43662090[source]▶
They can just plug the google.com web page into their AI. They already do that.
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2. fragmede ◴[12 Apr 25 12:02 UTC] No.43663664[source]▶
but because users are used to doing that for free, they can't charge money for that, but if they don't charge money for that, and no one's seeing ads, then where does they money come from?
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3. eitally ◴[12 Apr 25 15:10 UTC] No.43665059[source]▶
Well, it clearly affects search ads, but in terms of revenue streams Google is already somewhat diversified:

1. Search ads (at risk of disintermediation) 2. Display ads (not going anywhere) 3. Ad-supported YouTube 4. Ad-supported YouTube TV 5. Ad-supported Maps 6. Partnership/Ad supported Travel, YouTube, News, Shopping (and probably several more) 7. Hardware (ChromeOS licensing, Android, Pixel, Nest) 8. Cloud

There are probably more ad-supported or ad-enhanced properties, but what's been shifting over the past few years is the focus on subscription-supported products:

1. YouTube TV 2. YouTube Premium 3. GoogleOne (initially for storage, but now also for advanced AI access) 4. Nest Aware 5. Android Play Store 6. Google Fi 7. Workspace (and affiliated products)

In terms of search, we're already seeing a renaissance of new options, most of which are AI-powered or enhanced, like basic LLM interfaces (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc), or fundamentally improved products like Perplexity & Kagi. But Google has a broad and deep moat relative to any direct competitors. Its existential risk factors are mostly regulation/legal challenge and specific product competition, but not everything on all fronts all at once.