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Alphabet Q1 2025 Earnings [pdf]
- bearjaws 1y agoGoogle / Alphabet will be a strong contender going forward in generative AI. Vertex AI is a pretty decent platform, but Gemini 2.5 pro and Gemini Flash are excellent. I've been leveraging 2.0 Flash for processing help desk type tickets with long comment chains and its speed / performance is excellent. The only thing I find strange is multi-turn prompts tend to fall apart.
- sanp 1y agoWhat’s a multi-turn prompt?
- lazharichir 1y agoI assume they mean that you send an Array<Message> to the model instead of a single system and user message.
- bobxmax 1y agoIt's hard to bet against Google now, and Sundar deserves his flowers when a year ago everyone was proclaiming the death of Google. They've caught up and even surpassed Open AI.
- riku_iki 1y agoIts easy to bet, more and more people switching to chatbots with tasks they previously used search for, and this can dramatically affect Google main revenue stream: Search Ads.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- harmmonica 1y agoWhen you say "surpassed" do you specifically mean their models are more capable than OpenAI? I'm pretty sure that's what you mean. If that is what you mean, how do you look at it from a product standpoint? Sounds like ChatGPT has 10 million (paying?) subscribers across their products. Does Google have an analog subscription service ("AI Premium" sounds like one, but I've heard no publicity about their subs)? If they don't have a direct analog, has Google also surpassed ChatGPT with some kind of productization of their AI offerings? If they have, can someone educate me on what that/those products are? I realize AI is, for better or worse, baked into every Google product. Maybe there're add-ons in, for instance, GCP for those offerings that companies are leveraging, but just trying to understand if this is another case where Google has actually pulled back ahead tech-wise, but still hasn't figured out how to productize it. edit: grammar
- xnx 1y ago> how do you look at it from a product standpoint? From what I can tell, (I don't use ChatGPT) Google has every feature OpenAI has, and then a lot more included in other Google products. Google may not have as many distinct paying AI customers because they get it for free (e.g. college students) or as part of another subscription.
- bobxmax 1y agoI think Open AI is still far ahead as a consumer choice, and I'm not sure that Google can catch them. However model capabilities, and especially now that they're integrating Gemini into Google Search (which was a disaster initially, but improving now) the Googlefying is happening. It'll be curious what they do with projects like Imagen and Veo though.
- verdverm 1y agoYou can ask Gemini to create images and it calls out to ImageGen, though this sequence may depend on the model you use Every Google Workspace customer is getting access to the Gemini lineup. That's a pretty big user base
- kompleksanda 1y ago[dead]
- kompleksanda 1y ago[dead]
- GodelNumbering 1y agoAn earnings thread on HN? Time for Faramir, captain of Gondor to show his quality! The nominal EPS beat appears massive but an important caveat on that EPS beat: a significant portion of this EPS outperformance stemmed from a non-operational item: an $8.0 billion unrealized gain on a non-marketable equity security, which added $7.7 billion to net income, equivalent to $0.62 per share. Although even without this, they would be beating the consensus estimates Their Capex went up 43% YoY to $17.20 billion likely from higher investment in AI infrastructure. The interesting story is their margin expansion. They were consistently at 32% margin for multiple quarters. This time they broke out to 34% Finally, a new $70 billion share repurchase plan and a 5% increase in the quarterly dividend to $0.21 per share. source: https://signalbloom.ai/news/GOOGL/alphabet-q1-earnings-surge-past-estimates-boosted-by-8b-gain-as-cloud-growth-holds-at-28 https://signalbloom.ai/news/GOOGL/alphabet-q1-earnings-surge... disclaimer: I run this site, it was launched on HN recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43675248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43675248
- jfengel 1y agoThe blood of Numenor yet flows at your web site. Kudos.
- harmmonica 1y agoI read your summary link (nice work!). When you say "enhanced efficiency" for the margin growth is that a euphemism for decreases in headcount?
- GodelNumbering 1y agoNope, they in fact increased headcount YoY. That is covered in a section of the article. "...overall margin expansion this quarter seems more attributable to leverage within Google Services and S&M (sic. sales and marketing) discipline rather than broad-based cost containment..."
- harmmonica 1y agoOk, got it. Will now read the rest of the article!
- xnx 1y agoAre expected outcomes of the multiple monopoly trials already priced-in? I'm long on Google because their AI tech is the best and real world implementations like Waymo are so far ahead of everyone else.
- decimalenough 1y agoIf you believe the efficient stock market hypothesis, everything is always priced in.
- xnx 1y agoAgree. I'm confused, but glad that the market doesn't seem to think that antitrust remedies will hurt Google significantly.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jfengel 1y agoEverything is priced in but it's swamped by exuberance. So a thing can be really well positioned and still overpriced. It's difficult to trade fundamentals for high profile tech companies.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- decimalenough 1y agoGoogle is now sitting on a pile of nearly $100 billion in cash and half a trillion dollars in total assets. No deep thoughts on what this means, just general astonishment at how big megacorps are today. Remember, these figures are not fuzzy notional "market cap" or something, but cold hard cash for the first and real world assets that could be sold off and turned into cold hard cash for the second.
- xnx 1y ago> half a trillion dollars in total assets No doubt that's a huge number. Google's TPUs, GPUs, and other tech hardware probably has a pretty short usable life where it doesn't make financials sense (in terms of powering it and cooling it) to use it at all after a few years.
- bobxmax 1y agoI wonder if they'll go on an acquisition spree (which they previewed with Character AI). There are so many strong AI labs right now ripe for the picking.
- azemetre 1y agoThey say the best time is usually before the Federal government wants your head, now is a good time as any I suppose.
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- mrtksn 1y agoObviously amazing results but its again that time when its feeling like this is about a legacy company. The establishment apparently isn't even picking up the AI revolution yet as more than half of their revenue comes from Search, which is something that I rarely use these days. If they have any AI revenue, it must be a subset in a subset of their businesses. So much potential for the AI transformation and although it is the prime topic for many many people apparently it even hasn't started yet.
- mattlondon 1y ago> So much potential for the AI transformation and although it is the prime topic for many many people apparently it even hasn't started yet. Hasn't happened yet you say, but yet they have the best model right now, with rumors about "claybrook" circulating on webdev arena being even better than their already-the-best-in-the-market SOTA model. If Google have not even started yet, and they're currently way ahead of the pack, then this sounds like a good thing to me.
- mrtksn 1y agoI'm not sure about their models but I agree that if they win the AI race it would be a much better eventuality than the current viable alternatives.
- jpcookie 1y ago[dead]