> 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
replySundar Pichai just this week.
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/google-ceo-...
This can be just as well phrased as:
reply> Our frontier AI business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term development because we are making compute trade-offs to support our cloud business revenues.
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.
replySigning 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%.
replyGoogle 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.
replyim talking about research compute allocation
replyIt'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.
replyIt has gotten a lot better and it's useful for information on most normal search queries now.
replyTo be fair the search version of Gemini is nowhere near as bad as it used to be. The bar is in the floor I know.
reply