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This is one of the reasons I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. For all its breakthroughs, OpenAI lacks any fiscal

This is one of the reasons I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. For all its breakthroughs, OpenAI lacks any fiscal discipline. Sam Altman seems convinced that as long as they’re delivering value and have a clear mission, the money will somehow take care of itself. That’s fine for now, but the music will stop playing one day. When it comes to software engineering at scale, nothing beats Google. They already operate the world’s largest and (profitable) information index, they design their own chips, and employ the best engineers who know how to deliver massive systems cost-effectively. They can sustain large investment far longer than any other company simply because of how profitable all their existing businesses are. I just wish they would get their act together when it comes to product management.

hypeatei 1y ago
I hold the exact same sentiment. The safest investment you can make in this AI race is Alphabet. The smaller players being wrapped up in this (CRWV, NOK, etc...) are going to get obliterated when the returns are not as good as previously thought. The bigger players will take a hit, but not as much as the small ones. NVIDIA also seems like a risky bet given all the money they're passing around in circles to themselves via multi-billion dollar "investments"
- wslh 1y ago
  NVIDIA also seems like a risky bet because Google has their own chips R&D. It's not just another data center buying NVIDIA's GPUs. BTW Apple is following suit regarding chips, don't know if at some point Apple will offer any cloud service or continue to work on their ecosystem only. Beyond that there are a lot of new chip companies attacking the market: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45686790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45686790
  - sjs382 1y ago
    While Google has their own chips, they don't really have the market power there to buy up bleeding-edge manufacturing capacity. Apple on the other hand... (though they're behind in other regards)
    - wslh 1y ago
      But they were just an example. They are many players arising. You can look at this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45746246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45746246 even <https://www.nextsilicon.com/ https://www.nextsilicon.com/> is not on that list. I don't see a natural monopoly anymore.
  - lubesGordi 1y ago
    This makes sense to me. Where I work our ai team set up a couple h100 cards and are hosting a newer model that uses up around 80GB vram. You can see the gpu utilization on graphana go to like 80% for seconds as it processes a single request. That was very surprising to me. This is $30k worth of hardware that can support only a couple users and maybe only 1 if you have an agent going. Now, maybe we're doing something wrong, but it's hard to imagine anyone is going to make money on hosting billions of dollars of these cards when you're making $20 a month per card. I guess it depends on how active your users are. Hard to imagine anthropic is right side up here.
    - mike_hearn 1y ago
      But was that with batching? It makes a big difference. You can run many requests in parallel on the same card if you're doing LLM inferencing.
- BoredPositron 1y ago
  It's not that easy. Tim is probably rubbing his hands until he can bring anthropic under the apple umbrella.
  - whynotminot 1y ago
    Might have missed the boat on that. It’s everyone’s wet dream that Apple buys Anthropic, but I’m guessing their valuation now is already too high even for Apple. And why would Amazon let that happen? It’s a solid match but not happening unless the AI market craters and Apple swoops in to buy them for vastly less.
    - dangus 1y ago
      I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple eventually decides that AI isn’t even a market worth existing in beyond some basic on-device tools. They might say, have fun making single digit or negative profit margins on AI, we’ll sell subscriptions and iPhones and extended warranties.
      - garbthetill 1y ago
        apple is quite smart with this, there was a time when people thought they were dumb for not buying up tesla and ultimately shutting down their self driving division, but now it seems like a good bet.
      - raw_anon_1111 1y ago
        All reports are that Apple isn’t really focusing on building their own server side models and is mostly just going to be a platform for other companies to fight over just like they said they don’t pay OpenAI anything for the current integration and Google pays them $20B+ a year to be the default search engine. It makes no sense for Apple to waste money on having their own LLM when they are becoming commoditized - just chose the one that will give them the best deal.
        mnky9800n 1y ago
- mattbrewsbytes 1y ago
  If you look back at the dot com era, hardware companies did survive but weren't the financial "winners". Cisco is an example and a good comparison is Amazon - their bread and butter now is ecommerce, they dominate it and that was borne out of that bubble. Alphabet also has massive market share with YouTube, solid cloud offerings, Waymo which already has driverless/unsupervised robot taxis and their old standby search which is morphing more into more AI answers when you throw questions in your browser. Alphabet's P/E ratio is lower than the S&P 500's. Some may argue the S&P is mostly being held up by Tech and AI related companies so stock in Alphabet could be seen as undervalued and NVDIA as overvalued. Hardware almost always ends up getting commoditized so investing in hardware companies for the long haul does carry maybe more risk than mainly software companies.
- sjs382 1y ago
  > The safest investment you can make in this AI race is Alphabet. From the technical/talent/funding side, I agree with you. With Alphabet, the real risk is that they lose interest/focus and kill (or pivot) products early. I don't really see that happening in the short term (considering the hype/investments/cash around AI) but maybe in the medium to long term if things start to get stale. Even with that risk though, I agree with you.
  - overfeed 1y ago
    The chances of Alphabet losing interest in AI are vanishingly small. Google (pre-Alphabet remaming) was the AI company before AI companies were called that.
    - acdha 1y ago
      They didn’t lose interest in messaging when they cycled through half a dozen different apps but the problem was they were building products they wanted to exist rather than what users wanted. I’d worry about AI getting similar churn if PMs make their name by launching a new product rather than improving an existing one.
      - overfeed 1y ago
        The root comment was investor-centric, i.e. if you want to divert some investment towards AI, Alphabet is a smart bet. Investors got great returns as Google churned messaging platforms, and this will likely be the case ad Google churns through AI products, or even entire architectures.
        acdha 1y ago
        We did get good returns but that was because other units did very well. It’s not a given but still too likely that they’d botch AI products but still be profitable due to ad sales continuing to grow. I do think AI has better than average chances, though, because it seems to have scared their senior management enough to do their jobs: from outside, everything appears to radiate “this can’t fail” in a way they haven’t had since the 2000s.
- _DeadFred_ 1y ago
  Man I remember when IBM was the safe bet. I remember when SCO had an all hands meeting that they evaluated that linux wasn't a threat because SCO was the safe choice, the big player in UNIX on commodity hardware. I don't think tech works that way.
torben-friis 1y ago
If ability to sustain investment was the key apple wouldn’t be fumbling the ball so hard, wouldn’t they? I can’t understand how they’re bleeding talent.
crazygringo 1y ago
I think it'll be Google and effectively Microsoft -- OpenAI is already so partnered with Microsoft, and if OpenAI messes up financially, Microsoft will end up bailing it out in exchange for majority ownership. So yes the music may stop playing but that doesn't mean OpenAI disappears, but maybe Sam does. Unless there are antitrust concerns, but that's hard to see because Google is competition and Anthropic will probably remain the third more niche player.
oceanplexian 1y ago
It's not really impressive to me in absolute terms that GCP grew by 34% because it's still in last place behind Azure. I worked with all three major CSPs at a past company and Google, by far, had the worst support, the worst network, the most issues, and at the same time they were the least willing to build custom features for us while Azure and AWS would constantly fight for our business. IMHO I think Microsoft is a lot closer in terms of creating a real business around AI because they understand Enterprise customers. In fact they were first to offer private OpenAI deployments with AuthN/AuthZ that you could drop in your own VPC and the ability to handle sensitive data while everyone else was handing out API keys off a public endpoint like a startup. Don't get me wrong Google has had some okay technology (i.e. Gemini 2.5 is middle of the pack) but they seem like a very consumer-oriented company and don't seem to know how to market them.
- gigatexal 1y ago
  Maybe I was not at your scale but I’ve had the exact opposite experience with GCP. I would prefer to use it but now I work at an all AWS shop.
- orwin 1y ago
  I build tools for our security teams, I guarantee you the only reason we use Microsoft Azure is corporate deals. All the critical infrastructure is on AWS (including our Azure monitoring tools), and if we could move from Azure to GCP all our security experts would be happy (except maybe the red team members whose job would be harder)
  - JustExAWS 1y ago
    You’re being way too dismissive of the importance of sales, customer support, inertia and reputation are when it comes to technology choices. Google loses on all of those fronts.
- seneca 1y ago
  I have used the major hyperscalers for years. I agree with you that Google is the worst business partner, but saying they have the worst network and more issues does not align with my experience at all. Azure is miles behind on technical prowess.
gigatexal 1y ago
Re AI their continued investment in TPUs might one day prove existentially competitive to Nvidia’a GPUs?
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jasode 1y ago
>I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. Your mention of "VC funding" may be a placeholder for conversational purposes but just to clarify, OpenAI is way beyond the small pocketbooks of typical Venture Capitalists. They have investments from huge sovereign wealth funds (e.g. billions from Middle East oil funds) and trillion-dollar corporations like NVIDIA, Microsoft, AMD, etc. In other words, OpenAI has embedded itself into the money and tech ecosystem much more deeply than the dotcom failed startup Webvan burning through the limited cash of Sequoia VC. There are lots of heavily funded vested interests that don't want to see Google be the ultimate winner (or only winner).
- thelastgallon 1y ago
  So did wework. Didn't stop it from going under. Some financial truths are like shouting at gravity.
  - keeda 1y ago
    Wework's CEO was not hobnobbing with the leaders of sovereign nations.
onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago
Google is on pace to have >1B Gemini MAUs by Q2 2026. This definitely doesn't look like it's going to be a winner takes all market. OpenAI doesn't release MAUs, but it's possible Gemini could surpass OpenAI in MAUs (but really unlikely DAUs) by the end of 2026.
ryandvm 1y ago
Google has the resources to win AI, but I still don't see a way to resolve the tension between good AI and ad revenue. A useful AI tells me what I need to know, but Google's cash cow is selling users to advertisers. Those are fundamentally oppositional and I don't see a clear way to resolve it. Google can kick ass in AI all day, but soon Gemini is going to be saying shit like, "it sounds like your air conditioner is broken, maybe you should call Clearwater HVAC - they're the best!" Once Google has to start making money from AI, talking to Gemini is going to feel like talking to that friend that invited you to dinner only to try to pitch you on an MLM.
- martythemaniak 1y ago
  There is no way for anyone to resolve it, you'll either be paying premium, running last gen stuff locally, or getting ads, regardless of whether you use Google, OpenAI or anyone else.
- sumeno 1y ago
  and you think the competitors won't put ads in?
  - ml-anon 1y ago
    Wtf does “put ads in” mean? Google ads is one of the most sophisticated and profitable machines on the planet. People seem to think it’s as simple as <your ad here>.
    - sumeno 1y ago
      The competitors will either figure it out or run out of money and collapse (or, both)
- raw_anon_1111 1y ago
  They have an entire cloud division and they just announced it grew by 33%
- ml-anon 1y ago
garbthetill 1y ago
idk google is so flaky, one must not forget that they had the llm concept first and couldnt really materialize it into anything commercial until chat gpt came around. Google often could dominate a market, yet they kill the product/tech instead of keeping a small team to maintain it. I think the winner will be between xai or meta, im leaning more with xai since elon seems to always have 100% conviction even with seemingly bad ideas and he is way more technical than sam & zuck
- rightbyte 1y ago
  > they had the llm concept first and couldnt really materialize it into anything commercial until chat gpt came around. Wasn't the "fuzzy search" that ignored keywords run by some sort of LLM? I.e. "lady gaga age" would return documents with "lady gaga old" etc.
  - disgruntledphd2 1y ago
    > Wasn't the "fuzzy search" that ignored keywords run by some sort of LLM? I.e. "lady gaga age" would return documents with "lady gaga old" etc. That was embeddings AFAIK, so yeah, similar technology to LLMs.
- VirusNewbie 1y ago
  You honestly think talent is going to xAI? Why do neither of these companies have a SoTA model?
pu_pe 1y ago
Wouldn't this same logic apply to IBM back in its heyday? The biggest risk for Google is that it is already a behemoth and it has lost a lot of what made it so special. I also think they have a huge conflict of interest when it comes to AI, because it is a threat to their core business.
neya 1y ago
I've been a GCP consultant for close to a decade now. Google messed up big time lagging behind in AI - they just kept increasing prices in other products for about 5 years straight (CDN, for example) and did nothing to productize AI. I'm of the belief that ChatGPT should've been their pilot project. What they have now (AI mode) in Google should've been there well before ChatGPT. But, all that aside, you know what they're really good at? Google Cloud. I'm a user of all the major Cloud providers and nothing beats GCP's interface. Azure? Complicated, buggy and unreliable. There's some exploit every quarter. AWS? Overly complex security policies even to deploy a basic app, very enterprise focused and startup-unfriendly. GCP - you can be up and running on a serverless/VM instance in your lunch break. Simple, reliable, scales effortlessly. We serve 10M+ visitors on there and we've had zero issues in the last half a decade with them. They suck at a lot of other things and they have a lot of other problems. But boy, are they good at Cloud. No wonder even Apple is their customer. It's one of the few products from Google where you can say "it just works".
- jart 1y ago
  I think App Engine was really ahead of its time in showing how simple cloud deployments can be. It had a similar ease of use as setting up a YouTube account. For that reason, a lot of people thought of it as a toy, which was kind of unfair because companies like Niantic were able to build global products on it. So a lot of Google Cloud afterward ended up being designed to be more "normal" like how Amazon is. Now people are seeing what normal gets them, so maybe it's going to be time for the Google way of doing things to finally shine. (Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee)
  - mind-blight 1y ago
    Ah, that's a shame they went that way. What I tell people when they're first getting into GCP is that it's gonna be a passion to set up what you want. But, the offerings are great, and once it's working, it'll just work
  - dekhn 1y ago
    App Engine caused a huge innovator's dilemma for Google when it came to cloud. It only addressed a set of use cases around web application development- Folks would ask "why shoudl we build a low-margin cloud?" and I'd tell people: "if I can't import numpy, App Engine is useless to me". Eventually, the useful bits of AE were extracted to other services with APIs (datastore is one example), but it wasn't until google built a full GCP that they started to see real cloud growth (revenue). "Normal" is what most of us want.
sixtyj 1y ago
And after people get used to using AI from Google, they discontinue it, just like they’ve done with so many other services. Sarcasm, of course, for those who didn’t catch it - it’s hard to make jokes online. Google has so much cash from other services…
0_____0 1y ago
Google also own the ad space in a way that's unsurpassed, and that's the most direct route from where they are with their AI product and profitability. Tangentially, it's sad to see AI become yet another attention factory. Sora 2 is OAI trying to get the jump on this, but I think it's quite likely that they'll get clobbered by Google and Meta when those companies start juicing their users attention in the same way - they have the ad buyers and the infrastructure for that business already, it's literally how they've made money this whole time.
jasonthorsness 1y ago
Money alone cannot win the race; it will require a strong vision, courage, and luck. OpenAI and XAI and Anthropic (though underfunded) seem to lead in those factors so far.
misiti3780 1y ago
I have been saying the exact same thing for a while
lelanthran 1y ago
> This is one of the reasons I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. They've already successfully monetised their chatbot (Gemini)[1] while all the others are still wondering how to get there. ------------------- [1] I've got about 15 - 20 additions to the settings to prefix all chats with "don't show me video links", but apparently the "show youtube link" is at the system layer and cannot be overridden at all.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y ago
Isn't Microsoft maybe waiting for that and grab OpenAI at a huge discount?
nycdatasci 1y ago
"When it comes to software engineering at scale, nothing beats Google" I agree with many of your statements, but this one simply isn't true. They've really struggled to integrate AI into products in a useful way. Do you remember glue on pizza? Founding Fathers reimagined for DEI? The Brain/DeepMind merger was largely an acknowledgement of their many misses from a product perspective.
- tim333 1y ago
  The pizza glue and DEI stuff were temporary glitches on new products. Their basic engineering on search, gmail etc is pretty solid.
_DeadFred_ 1y ago
Google's new AI voice assistant finally seems to reliably set timers. The problem is they released it what, a year ago? And during that time it didn't and I now no longer trust the AI on my phone to do tasks. Google themselves trained me not to trust their AI tools. Youtube (Google) currently degrades my feed because when I block AI videos, they assume I dislike the related topic. They have made it either I love AI videos/music, or they punish me. You are right, they have stakeholders causing inertia to protect their fiefdoms across a large range of products. You are right, they have (profitable) current products which will prove to be barriers to nimble, future, nearterm non-profitable products. I'm not sure that's a strength seeing how they have responded so far. They are too big and too slow to adapt. They have too many people with interests in protecting their (legacy) niche, too much inertia to overcome. The classic signs of a zombie company. Going purely off their ability to adapt in the last year, they are dead and don't even know it yet.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y ago
To be fair, Alphabet id REQUIRED to be strong in AI. Google as a search engine is losing clicks to its own AI summaries. If they didn't have that, they would risk the ad business in the future
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
"They already operate the world's largest and (profitable) information index, they design their own chips, and employ the best engineers who know how to deliver massive systems cost-effectively." https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425000043/goog-20250331.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425... "Nature of Operations Google was incorporated in California in September 1998 and re-incorporated in the State of Delaware in August 2003. In 2015, we implemented a holding company reorganization, and as a result, Alphabet Inc. ("Alphabet") became the successor issuer to Google. We generate revenues by delivering relevant, cost-effective online advertising; cloud-based solutions that provide enterprise customers of all sizes with infrastructure, platform services, and applications; sales of other products and services, such as fees received for subscription-based products, apps and in-app purchases, and devices." Would "(profitable) information index" be included in (a) "online advertising" (b) "cloud-based solutions" or (c) "sales of other products and services"
- mvdtnz 1y ago
  It's hard to understand what point you're trying to make with your weird quoting. Can you elaborate in a straightforward way?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  HN comment claims Alphabet operates (profitable) information index But Alphabet SEC filing discloses its revenue-generating operations are (a) online advertising delivery, (b) cloud-based solutions and (c) sales of other products and services US law requires the statements in Alphabet's disclosure to be accurate, not misleading Nothing requires statements in HN comments to be accurate, not misleading What is "(profitable) information index" Is it part of (a) online advertising delivery, b) cloud-based solutions or (c) sales of other products and services

hypeatei 1y ago

I hold the exact same sentiment. The safest investment you can make in this AI race is Alphabet. The smaller players being wrapped up in this (CRWV, NOK, etc...) are going to get obliterated when the returns are not as good as previously thought. The bigger players will take a hit, but not as much as the small ones. NVIDIA also seems like a risky bet given all the money they're passing around in circles to themselves via multi-billion dollar "investments"

wslh 1y ago
NVIDIA also seems like a risky bet because Google has their own chips R&D. It's not just another data center buying NVIDIA's GPUs. BTW Apple is following suit regarding chips, don't know if at some point Apple will offer any cloud service or continue to work on their ecosystem only. Beyond that there are a lot of new chip companies attacking the market: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45686790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45686790
- sjs382 1y ago
  While Google has their own chips, they don't really have the market power there to buy up bleeding-edge manufacturing capacity. Apple on the other hand... (though they're behind in other regards)
  - wslh 1y ago
    But they were just an example. They are many players arising. You can look at this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45746246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45746246 even <https://www.nextsilicon.com/ https://www.nextsilicon.com/> is not on that list. I don't see a natural monopoly anymore.
- lubesGordi 1y ago
  This makes sense to me. Where I work our ai team set up a couple h100 cards and are hosting a newer model that uses up around 80GB vram. You can see the gpu utilization on graphana go to like 80% for seconds as it processes a single request. That was very surprising to me. This is $30k worth of hardware that can support only a couple users and maybe only 1 if you have an agent going. Now, maybe we're doing something wrong, but it's hard to imagine anyone is going to make money on hosting billions of dollars of these cards when you're making $20 a month per card. I guess it depends on how active your users are. Hard to imagine anthropic is right side up here.
  - mike_hearn 1y ago
    But was that with batching? It makes a big difference. You can run many requests in parallel on the same card if you're doing LLM inferencing.
BoredPositron 1y ago
It's not that easy. Tim is probably rubbing his hands until he can bring anthropic under the apple umbrella.
- whynotminot 1y ago
  Might have missed the boat on that. It’s everyone’s wet dream that Apple buys Anthropic, but I’m guessing their valuation now is already too high even for Apple. And why would Amazon let that happen? It’s a solid match but not happening unless the AI market craters and Apple swoops in to buy them for vastly less.
  - dangus 1y ago
    I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple eventually decides that AI isn’t even a market worth existing in beyond some basic on-device tools. They might say, have fun making single digit or negative profit margins on AI, we’ll sell subscriptions and iPhones and extended warranties.
    - garbthetill 1y ago
      apple is quite smart with this, there was a time when people thought they were dumb for not buying up tesla and ultimately shutting down their self driving division, but now it seems like a good bet.
    - raw_anon_1111 1y ago
      All reports are that Apple isn’t really focusing on building their own server side models and is mostly just going to be a platform for other companies to fight over just like they said they don’t pay OpenAI anything for the current integration and Google pays them $20B+ a year to be the default search engine. It makes no sense for Apple to waste money on having their own LLM when they are becoming commoditized - just chose the one that will give them the best deal.
      - mnky9800n 1y ago
mattbrewsbytes 1y ago
If you look back at the dot com era, hardware companies did survive but weren't the financial "winners". Cisco is an example and a good comparison is Amazon - their bread and butter now is ecommerce, they dominate it and that was borne out of that bubble. Alphabet also has massive market share with YouTube, solid cloud offerings, Waymo which already has driverless/unsupervised robot taxis and their old standby search which is morphing more into more AI answers when you throw questions in your browser. Alphabet's P/E ratio is lower than the S&P 500's. Some may argue the S&P is mostly being held up by Tech and AI related companies so stock in Alphabet could be seen as undervalued and NVDIA as overvalued. Hardware almost always ends up getting commoditized so investing in hardware companies for the long haul does carry maybe more risk than mainly software companies.
sjs382 1y ago
> The safest investment you can make in this AI race is Alphabet. From the technical/talent/funding side, I agree with you. With Alphabet, the real risk is that they lose interest/focus and kill (or pivot) products early. I don't really see that happening in the short term (considering the hype/investments/cash around AI) but maybe in the medium to long term if things start to get stale. Even with that risk though, I agree with you.
- overfeed 1y ago
  The chances of Alphabet losing interest in AI are vanishingly small. Google (pre-Alphabet remaming) was the AI company before AI companies were called that.
  - acdha 1y ago
    They didn’t lose interest in messaging when they cycled through half a dozen different apps but the problem was they were building products they wanted to exist rather than what users wanted. I’d worry about AI getting similar churn if PMs make their name by launching a new product rather than improving an existing one.
    - overfeed 1y ago
      The root comment was investor-centric, i.e. if you want to divert some investment towards AI, Alphabet is a smart bet. Investors got great returns as Google churned messaging platforms, and this will likely be the case ad Google churns through AI products, or even entire architectures.
      - acdha 1y ago
        We did get good returns but that was because other units did very well. It’s not a given but still too likely that they’d botch AI products but still be profitable due to ad sales continuing to grow. I do think AI has better than average chances, though, because it seems to have scared their senior management enough to do their jobs: from outside, everything appears to radiate “this can’t fail” in a way they haven’t had since the 2000s.
_DeadFred_ 1y ago
Man I remember when IBM was the safe bet. I remember when SCO had an all hands meeting that they evaluated that linux wasn't a threat because SCO was the safe choice, the big player in UNIX on commodity hardware. I don't think tech works that way.

torben-friis 1y ago

If ability to sustain investment was the key apple wouldn’t be fumbling the ball so hard, wouldn’t they? I can’t understand how they’re bleeding talent.

crazygringo 1y ago

I think it'll be Google and effectively Microsoft -- OpenAI is already so partnered with Microsoft, and if OpenAI messes up financially, Microsoft will end up bailing it out in exchange for majority ownership. So yes the music may stop playing but that doesn't mean OpenAI disappears, but maybe Sam does. Unless there are antitrust concerns, but that's hard to see because Google is competition and Anthropic will probably remain the third more niche player.

oceanplexian 1y ago

It's not really impressive to me in absolute terms that GCP grew by 34% because it's still in last place behind Azure. I worked with all three major CSPs at a past company and Google, by far, had the worst support, the worst network, the most issues, and at the same time they were the least willing to build custom features for us while Azure and AWS would constantly fight for our business. IMHO I think Microsoft is a lot closer in terms of creating a real business around AI because they understand Enterprise customers. In fact they were first to offer private OpenAI deployments with AuthN/AuthZ that you could drop in your own VPC and the ability to handle sensitive data while everyone else was handing out API keys off a public endpoint like a startup. Don't get me wrong Google has had some okay technology (i.e. Gemini 2.5 is middle of the pack) but they seem like a very consumer-oriented company and don't seem to know how to market them.

gigatexal 1y ago
Maybe I was not at your scale but I’ve had the exact opposite experience with GCP. I would prefer to use it but now I work at an all AWS shop.
orwin 1y ago
I build tools for our security teams, I guarantee you the only reason we use Microsoft Azure is corporate deals. All the critical infrastructure is on AWS (including our Azure monitoring tools), and if we could move from Azure to GCP all our security experts would be happy (except maybe the red team members whose job would be harder)
- JustExAWS 1y ago
  You’re being way too dismissive of the importance of sales, customer support, inertia and reputation are when it comes to technology choices. Google loses on all of those fronts.
seneca 1y ago
I have used the major hyperscalers for years. I agree with you that Google is the worst business partner, but saying they have the worst network and more issues does not align with my experience at all. Azure is miles behind on technical prowess.

gigatexal 1y ago

Re AI their continued investment in TPUs might one day prove existentially competitive to Nvidia’a GPUs?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

jasode 1y ago

>I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. Your mention of "VC funding" may be a placeholder for conversational purposes but just to clarify, OpenAI is way beyond the small pocketbooks of typical Venture Capitalists. They have investments from huge sovereign wealth funds (e.g. billions from Middle East oil funds) and trillion-dollar corporations like NVIDIA, Microsoft, AMD, etc. In other words, OpenAI has embedded itself into the money and tech ecosystem much more deeply than the dotcom failed startup Webvan burning through the limited cash of Sequoia VC. There are lots of heavily funded vested interests that don't want to see Google be the ultimate winner (or only winner).

thelastgallon 1y ago
So did wework. Didn't stop it from going under. Some financial truths are like shouting at gravity.
- keeda 1y ago
  Wework's CEO was not hobnobbing with the leaders of sovereign nations.

onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago

Google is on pace to have >1B Gemini MAUs by Q2 2026. This definitely doesn't look like it's going to be a winner takes all market. OpenAI doesn't release MAUs, but it's possible Gemini could surpass OpenAI in MAUs (but really unlikely DAUs) by the end of 2026.

ryandvm 1y ago

Google has the resources to win AI, but I still don't see a way to resolve the tension between good AI and ad revenue. A useful AI tells me what I need to know, but Google's cash cow is selling users to advertisers. Those are fundamentally oppositional and I don't see a clear way to resolve it. Google can kick ass in AI all day, but soon Gemini is going to be saying shit like, "it sounds like your air conditioner is broken, maybe you should call Clearwater HVAC - they're the best!" Once Google has to start making money from AI, talking to Gemini is going to feel like talking to that friend that invited you to dinner only to try to pitch you on an MLM.

martythemaniak 1y ago
There is no way for anyone to resolve it, you'll either be paying premium, running last gen stuff locally, or getting ads, regardless of whether you use Google, OpenAI or anyone else.
sumeno 1y ago
and you think the competitors won't put ads in?
- ml-anon 1y ago
  Wtf does “put ads in” mean? Google ads is one of the most sophisticated and profitable machines on the planet. People seem to think it’s as simple as <your ad here>.
  - sumeno 1y ago
    The competitors will either figure it out or run out of money and collapse (or, both)
raw_anon_1111 1y ago
They have an entire cloud division and they just announced it grew by 33%
ml-anon 1y ago

garbthetill 1y ago

idk google is so flaky, one must not forget that they had the llm concept first and couldnt really materialize it into anything commercial until chat gpt came around. Google often could dominate a market, yet they kill the product/tech instead of keeping a small team to maintain it. I think the winner will be between xai or meta, im leaning more with xai since elon seems to always have 100% conviction even with seemingly bad ideas and he is way more technical than sam & zuck

rightbyte 1y ago
> they had the llm concept first and couldnt really materialize it into anything commercial until chat gpt came around. Wasn't the "fuzzy search" that ignored keywords run by some sort of LLM? I.e. "lady gaga age" would return documents with "lady gaga old" etc.
- disgruntledphd2 1y ago
  > Wasn't the "fuzzy search" that ignored keywords run by some sort of LLM? I.e. "lady gaga age" would return documents with "lady gaga old" etc. That was embeddings AFAIK, so yeah, similar technology to LLMs.
VirusNewbie 1y ago
You honestly think talent is going to xAI? Why do neither of these companies have a SoTA model?

pu_pe 1y ago

Wouldn't this same logic apply to IBM back in its heyday? The biggest risk for Google is that it is already a behemoth and it has lost a lot of what made it so special. I also think they have a huge conflict of interest when it comes to AI, because it is a threat to their core business.

neya 1y ago

I've been a GCP consultant for close to a decade now. Google messed up big time lagging behind in AI - they just kept increasing prices in other products for about 5 years straight (CDN, for example) and did nothing to productize AI. I'm of the belief that ChatGPT should've been their pilot project. What they have now (AI mode) in Google should've been there well before ChatGPT. But, all that aside, you know what they're really good at? Google Cloud. I'm a user of all the major Cloud providers and nothing beats GCP's interface. Azure? Complicated, buggy and unreliable. There's some exploit every quarter. AWS? Overly complex security policies even to deploy a basic app, very enterprise focused and startup-unfriendly. GCP - you can be up and running on a serverless/VM instance in your lunch break. Simple, reliable, scales effortlessly. We serve 10M+ visitors on there and we've had zero issues in the last half a decade with them. They suck at a lot of other things and they have a lot of other problems. But boy, are they good at Cloud. No wonder even Apple is their customer. It's one of the few products from Google where you can say "it just works".

jart 1y ago
I think App Engine was really ahead of its time in showing how simple cloud deployments can be. It had a similar ease of use as setting up a YouTube account. For that reason, a lot of people thought of it as a toy, which was kind of unfair because companies like Niantic were able to build global products on it. So a lot of Google Cloud afterward ended up being designed to be more "normal" like how Amazon is. Now people are seeing what normal gets them, so maybe it's going to be time for the Google way of doing things to finally shine. (Disclaimer: I'm a Google employee)
- mind-blight 1y ago
  Ah, that's a shame they went that way. What I tell people when they're first getting into GCP is that it's gonna be a passion to set up what you want. But, the offerings are great, and once it's working, it'll just work
- dekhn 1y ago
  App Engine caused a huge innovator's dilemma for Google when it came to cloud. It only addressed a set of use cases around web application development- Folks would ask "why shoudl we build a low-margin cloud?" and I'd tell people: "if I can't import numpy, App Engine is useless to me". Eventually, the useful bits of AE were extracted to other services with APIs (datastore is one example), but it wasn't until google built a full GCP that they started to see real cloud growth (revenue). "Normal" is what most of us want.

sixtyj 1y ago

And after people get used to using AI from Google, they discontinue it, just like they’ve done with so many other services. Sarcasm, of course, for those who didn’t catch it - it’s hard to make jokes online. Google has so much cash from other services…

0_____0 1y ago

Google also own the ad space in a way that's unsurpassed, and that's the most direct route from where they are with their AI product and profitability. Tangentially, it's sad to see AI become yet another attention factory. Sora 2 is OAI trying to get the jump on this, but I think it's quite likely that they'll get clobbered by Google and Meta when those companies start juicing their users attention in the same way - they have the ad buyers and the infrastructure for that business already, it's literally how they've made money this whole time.

jasonthorsness 1y ago

Money alone cannot win the race; it will require a strong vision, courage, and luck. OpenAI and XAI and Anthropic (though underfunded) seem to lead in those factors so far.

misiti3780 1y ago

I have been saying the exact same thing for a while

lelanthran 1y ago

> This is one of the reasons I believe Google will ultimately win the AI race once the VC funding tap runs dry. They've already successfully monetised their chatbot (Gemini)[1] while all the others are still wondering how to get there. ------------------- [1] I've got about 15 - 20 additions to the settings to prefix all chats with "don't show me video links", but apparently the "show youtube link" is at the system layer and cannot be overridden at all.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y ago

Isn't Microsoft maybe waiting for that and grab OpenAI at a huge discount?

nycdatasci 1y ago

"When it comes to software engineering at scale, nothing beats Google" I agree with many of your statements, but this one simply isn't true. They've really struggled to integrate AI into products in a useful way. Do you remember glue on pizza? Founding Fathers reimagined for DEI? The Brain/DeepMind merger was largely an acknowledgement of their many misses from a product perspective.

tim333 1y ago
The pizza glue and DEI stuff were temporary glitches on new products. Their basic engineering on search, gmail etc is pretty solid.

_DeadFred_ 1y ago

Google's new AI voice assistant finally seems to reliably set timers. The problem is they released it what, a year ago? And during that time it didn't and I now no longer trust the AI on my phone to do tasks. Google themselves trained me not to trust their AI tools. Youtube (Google) currently degrades my feed because when I block AI videos, they assume I dislike the related topic. They have made it either I love AI videos/music, or they punish me. You are right, they have stakeholders causing inertia to protect their fiefdoms across a large range of products. You are right, they have (profitable) current products which will prove to be barriers to nimble, future, nearterm non-profitable products. I'm not sure that's a strength seeing how they have responded so far. They are too big and too slow to adapt. They have too many people with interests in protecting their (legacy) niche, too much inertia to overcome. The classic signs of a zombie company. Going purely off their ability to adapt in the last year, they are dead and don't even know it yet.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y ago

To be fair, Alphabet id REQUIRED to be strong in AI. Google as a search engine is losing clicks to its own AI summaries. If they didn't have that, they would risk the ad business in the future

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

"They already operate the world's largest and (profitable) information index, they design their own chips, and employ the best engineers who know how to deliver massive systems cost-effectively." https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425000043/goog-20250331.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204425... "Nature of Operations Google was incorporated in California in September 1998 and re-incorporated in the State of Delaware in August 2003. In 2015, we implemented a holding company reorganization, and as a result, Alphabet Inc. ("Alphabet") became the successor issuer to Google. We generate revenues by delivering relevant, cost-effective online advertising; cloud-based solutions that provide enterprise customers of all sizes with infrastructure, platform services, and applications; sales of other products and services, such as fees received for subscription-based products, apps and in-app purchases, and devices." Would "(profitable) information index" be included in (a) "online advertising" (b) "cloud-based solutions" or (c) "sales of other products and services"

mvdtnz 1y ago
It's hard to understand what point you're trying to make with your weird quoting. Can you elaborate in a straightforward way?
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
HN comment claims Alphabet operates (profitable) information index But Alphabet SEC filing discloses its revenue-generating operations are (a) online advertising delivery, (b) cloud-based solutions and (c) sales of other products and services US law requires the statements in Alphabet's disclosure to be accurate, not misleading Nothing requires statements in HN comments to be accurate, not misleading What is "(profitable) information index" Is it part of (a) online advertising delivery, b) cloud-based solutions or (c) sales of other products and services