Microsoft remains OpenAI’s primary cloud partner.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.
> Enterprises with Google Cloud spend commitments will be able to draw down their GCP commitments for these purchases.
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.
Sundar Pichai just this week.
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/google-ceo-...
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.
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!
Google is simply telling customers - there’s a new Google Cloud service, and you can use it under your existing account.
It doesn't matter if it's committed or not, it still won't be recognized on the formal financial statements.
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.
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.
These companies have a ton of cultural capital, sure, but in American capitalism that means nothing.
I imagine it's much easier to have fine grained control over AI search results if you develop and own the AI yourself.
If I were google there's no way I'd leave their AI overviews in place as-is.
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
However if you look at the trust busting era what preceded it was this exact kind of private “cooperation” to prevent government involvement
MOM-NG GNOMM NGMOM MGNOM MGMNO MGMON ONMGM NOMGM NOMMG
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.
They definitely need to have a better name if they're going to use 3p models
bc the alpha is not the model, the alpha is having the physical infra (chips, power, etc).
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.