The strategy that I’ve heard said out loud now by all the major technology companies is “we’re all doing it (AI) together”
In my view this was more or less the political result of the White House summit
So I think we’re seeing what is basically going to be a giant amorphous set of collaborations such that nobody gets taken down, and the whole market doesn’t collapse
If Alphabet, OAI, MSFT, AMZ…etc all agree to be interoperable then they will be acting more or less as a single body in tension.
Whether that’s good or not is a question of your worldview but I think that’s the strategy
Giant companies working together isn’t an AI-age phenomenon. Go back 10, 20, 30 years and you’ll see that despite the public perception of competitiveness all the largest tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Amazon) buy/sell to each other, sign partnerships and have tight economic interdependencies.
Nvidia GPUs let you load encrypted weights onto them and to decrypt on chip so Google would need to have some sort of Nvidia management firmware attack to read from HBM while the GPU is live
I bet it would be the NVIDIA, at least initially, not for the encryption capability per se, but for simple fact that adapting to TPU at high performance is non-trivial.
This is speculation, but funnily enough Gemini models show the least evidence of being distilled from OAI or Anthropic compared to everything else in the market.
I feel this is correct. Google has probably the most data of any company in the world. For better or worse, they don't need to train on the outputs of other models.
You are vastly overestimating the power of publishers. The top book publisher in the US is worth $5 billion. All publishers together are about $50 billion. The New York Times is $11 billion. Fox is about $15-25 billion. Add together every single book publisher, newspaper, magazine, TV/radio, digital publisher and really every print and broadcasting platform in the country and you’d reach about $100-$150 billion. That is roughly 3% of Google.
These companies have a ton of cultural capital, sure, but in American capitalism that means nothing.
I don't believe threat of litigation alone explains the extent of it.
The way an American company, esp a reputable one like Google, conducts itself internally is different. There will be much more internal backlash to do the wrong thing way before litigation.
Why would it? The point of Gemini is provide user facing services cheaper than if they were paying OpenAI, make some money on the side with API credits and position themselves as a leader when investors want to see AI everywhere.
Google Cloud is competing with AWS. Amazon has Bedrock so Google needs to keep up with them by serving both Claude and GPT, along with Gemini and open models.
I don't understand all the wild speculation and question here - openai is selling a shit ton of inference through third parties. these third parties want to provide inference to their customers who use gcp (and don't want to also inference through bedrock or azure ai foundary.
these are all zdr engagements and thus "enterprise" contracts.
basically it boils down to - anthropic already provides inference direct through GCP, Azure, and AWS - so to compete openai is doing the same.
> Enterprises with Google Cloud spend commitments will be able to draw down their GCP commitments for these purchases.
This is a fairly big move by Google... It means revenue they have already booked and reported to shareholders they now might have to give away - potentially all of it. Bean counters hate that!
“Reported to shareholders” doesn’t really mean anything. There are thousands of such line items on financial reports. The ones that matter, such as recognized revenue, don’t count future bookings. It is understood that customers renege on these commitments all the time.
Google is simply telling customers - there’s a new Google Cloud service, and you can use it under your existing account.
pretty sure that's what the "spend commitment" changes. It's a "use it or lose it" agreement. It's as good as a debt the moment it is signed, used or not.
GAAP does not permit booking contracted future revenue onto the balance sheet or income statement, because the spend is not actually an unconditional debt until the service has been rendered.
It doesn't matter if it's committed or not, it still won't be recognized on the formal financial statements.
Prediction: google cloud will pivot to being a hyperscaler versus a model + hyperscaler. Kind of like how xAI started hosting anthropic workloads with colossus cluster.
bc the alpha is not the model, the alpha is having the physical infra (chips, power, etc).
But x.ai also hosts Grok? Why would google stop developing their own models? I think you're right that Google will try to make money from their infrastructure (that's basically what Google Cloud is too).
>Kind of like how xAI started hosting anthropic workloads with colossus cluster.
Google has been hosting part of Anthropic's load long before that deal. They had a big degradation due to compiler bug for TPUs in an optimization they made to work around TPUs not being able sample from the logits efficiently.
Sergey better really go into "founder mode" or else Thomas Kurian (head of GCP) will continue to eat Deepmind's lunch.
Between selling TPUs to external companies and now hosting competitor models, Gemini just doesnt have the full faith of the Alphabet capital allocators, and I can't really blame them. A mature company like google would rather just expand their extremely profitable cloud business rather than dump billions into a black hole on the off chance they achieve RSI or superintelligence or whatever.
Google uses Gemini for its AI Overview on Google Search results, though. And it seems to me that this is an area where they really have a big incentive to run their own AI that they completely control. AI Overview sits at the top of the Google Search results first page, so when it comes to marketing it's sitting in the most coveted place on the entire Internet.
It's also marketing that their AI is hilariously terrible because AI Overview is the biggest posterchild for AI slop and often used as an example of how bad Google is at AI. Gemini proper isn't that bad, just the ultra cost cutting version on search is.
What does “capital allocators” mean here? If your implication is that the Gemini org is resource starved and a few extra dollars will put their model in the lead that is 100% incorrect. If anything it’s the bloat and bureaucracy keeping it behind.
Signing partnerships and hosting third party models costs Google nothing, and in fact brings in a ton of revenue that will eventually go back into Gemini.
Infra might very well be the right play. Over the past year, it seems like the evidence is on the side that there's no "secret sauce" in AI, and models will all converge towards similar capabilities. Not much margin to be had for having the best model for a month or less until another lab leapfrogs you by 3%.
> Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development
Google should just spin out DeepMind as an independent company and get out of the model building business: just sell tents and shovels as they say, and leave the actual (gold) mining to others.
Google Search is still a large fraction of Alphabet's revenue, and Alphabet needs to be able to deliver AI results for people's searches if it wants to stay relevant in the search game.
I imagine it's much easier to have fine grained control over AI search results if you develop and own the AI yourself.
I was thinking about them fine-tuning the results for marketing purposes. But I just did a bit of research and it seems that would probably actually be illegal. So never mind, maybe?
nsagent | 5 hours ago
hobofan | 4 hours ago
merelydev | 4 hours ago
echelon | 4 hours ago
OpenAI sells and reaches enterprise customers via GCP.
Enterprises want zero data retention guarantees and they're already on AWS or GCP, so this is how OpenAI reaches those customers and makes more money.
keerthiko | 3 hours ago
paxy | 2 hours ago
_boffin_ | 2 hours ago
_diyar | 58 minutes ago
> Enterprises with Google Cloud spend commitments will be able to draw down their GCP commitments for these purchases.
neuroelectron | 44 minutes ago
v4dm | 39 minutes ago
v4dm | 38 minutes ago
fakedang | 21 minutes ago
AndrewKemendo | 4 hours ago
Google, NVIDIA, OpenAI, MSFT…
GNOM…oh wait no
The strategy that I’ve heard said out loud now by all the major technology companies is “we’re all doing it (AI) together”
In my view this was more or less the political result of the White House summit
So I think we’re seeing what is basically going to be a giant amorphous set of collaborations such that nobody gets taken down, and the whole market doesn’t collapse
If Alphabet, OAI, MSFT, AMZ…etc all agree to be interoperable then they will be acting more or less as a single body in tension.
Whether that’s good or not is a question of your worldview but I think that’s the strategy
selimthegrim | 4 hours ago
solyin | 3 hours ago
MOM-NG GNOMM NGMOM MGNOM MGMNO MGMON ONMGM NOMGM NOMMG
paxy | 3 hours ago
AndrewKemendo | 3 hours ago
However if you look at the trust busting era what preceded it was this exact kind of private “cooperation” to prevent government involvement
simonw | 3 hours ago
AndrewKemendo | 3 hours ago
bananzamba | 4 hours ago
lrvick | 4 hours ago
aviinuo | 4 hours ago
binlog | 4 hours ago
worldsavior | 4 hours ago
Mond_ | 3 hours ago
tgma | 2 hours ago
jayd16 | 3 hours ago
zeroxfe | 3 hours ago
WarmWash | 4 hours ago
dumberquestions | 4 hours ago
BudaDude | 3 hours ago
binlog | 4 hours ago
amelius | 3 hours ago
paxy | 3 hours ago
kridsdale1 | 2 hours ago
paxy | an hour ago
These companies have a ton of cultural capital, sure, but in American capitalism that means nothing.
iamdelirium | 4 hours ago
tgma | 3 hours ago
paxy | 3 hours ago
tgma | 2 hours ago
The way an American company, esp a reputable one like Google, conducts itself internally is different. There will be much more internal backlash to do the wrong thing way before litigation.
toephu2 | 2 hours ago
tgma | 2 hours ago
skohan | an hour ago
amelius | 3 hours ago
skohan | an hour ago
amelius | an hour ago
123haw | 4 hours ago
kps | 3 hours ago
esseph | 2 hours ago
cubefox | 4 hours ago
dgellow | 4 hours ago
cubefox | 2 hours ago
iamdelirium | 4 hours ago
cubefox | 4 hours ago
tancop | 4 hours ago
Google Cloud is competing with AWS. Amazon has Bedrock so Google needs to keep up with them by serving both Claude and GPT, along with Gemini and open models.
open592 | 4 hours ago
these are all zdr engagements and thus "enterprise" contracts.
basically it boils down to - anthropic already provides inference direct through GCP, Azure, and AWS - so to compete openai is doing the same.
lemonish97 | 3 hours ago
They definitely need to have a better name if they're going to use 3p models
torben-friis | 2 hours ago
AznHisoka | 3 hours ago
londons_explore | 3 hours ago
This is a fairly big move by Google... It means revenue they have already booked and reported to shareholders they now might have to give away - potentially all of it. Bean counters hate that!
paxy | 2 hours ago
Google is simply telling customers - there’s a new Google Cloud service, and you can use it under your existing account.
redwood | an hour ago
londons_explore | an hour ago
MisterMunchkin | 41 minutes ago
mediaman | 14 minutes ago
It doesn't matter if it's committed or not, it still won't be recognized on the formal financial statements.
game_the0ry | 3 hours ago
bc the alpha is not the model, the alpha is having the physical infra (chips, power, etc).
hackernudes | 3 hours ago
ReptileMan | 2 hours ago
barumrho | 3 hours ago
paxy | 3 hours ago
cma | 2 hours ago
Google has been hosting part of Anthropic's load long before that deal. They had a big degradation due to compiler bug for TPUs in an optimization they made to work around TPUs not being able sample from the logits efficiently.
anthonypasq | 2 hours ago
Between selling TPUs to external companies and now hosting competitor models, Gemini just doesnt have the full faith of the Alphabet capital allocators, and I can't really blame them. A mature company like google would rather just expand their extremely profitable cloud business rather than dump billions into a black hole on the off chance they achieve RSI or superintelligence or whatever.
hax0ron3 | 2 hours ago
kenhwang | 2 hours ago
sebzim4500 | an hour ago
eecks | an hour ago
anthonypasq | an hour ago
paxy | an hour ago
Signing partnerships and hosting third party models costs Google nothing, and in fact brings in a ton of revenue that will eventually go back into Gemini.
skohan | an hour ago
bitpush | 50 minutes ago
Sundar Pichai just this week.
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/google-ceo-...
TiredOfLife | an hour ago
mlmonkey | an hour ago
hax0ron3 | an hour ago
I imagine it's much easier to have fine grained control over AI search results if you develop and own the AI yourself.
dpkirchner | an hour ago
If I were google there's no way I'd leave their AI overviews in place as-is.
hax0ron3 | an hour ago