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Google banks on AI edge to catch up to cloud rivals Amazon and Microsoft
- ViktorRay 6mo agoWhenever I read about how powerful these companies are, it sends chills down my spine.
- morkalork 6mo agoA new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- bigyabai 6mo agoAdSense is the one that people underestimate. It's a piranha pool of liquid cash, billions-scale impressions and near global outreach. Any sane nation would have banned it decades ago, unless it was propping up a global influence campaign for their government.
- parineum 6mo ago> Any sane nation would have banned it decades ago Why?
- inquirerGeneral 6mo ago[dead]
- bigyabai 6mo agoAdSense uses a sealed-bid auction system with arbitrary number of lots that Google controls. It's a FOMO market driven by artificial scarcity, and since Google contractually forbids AdSense-enabled websites from using competing services, it forces ad buyers to go through their closed, controlled system.
- SilverElfin 6mo agoThey forbid those websites from using competitors? Isn’t that blatantly illegal? I guess it’s not actually illegal until they lose a court case for antitrust.
- streptomycin 6mo agoBut in practice, nobody (well, nobody making lots of ad revenue from their website) uses AdSense exclusively. Most don't even use it at all - AdX is better as a header bidding fallback than AdSense. But those who do use AdSense as a fallback are using it in competition with many other ad networks.
- echelon 6mo agoGoogle owns 92% of all "URL bars". They turned this into "search". Every brand or product has to competitively bid for its own identity in a monopoly competitive bidding market. It's downright evil. Look at Google's AI rivals having to spend hundreds of millions just so customers can find them. Google Anthropic or OpenAI and see what you get. The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is. They also need to make it illegal to place ads for registered trademarks. The EU should get in on that too.
- Aerroon 6mo ago>The next admin needs to break Google up horizontally (not vertically) into competing browsers, clouds, and search products. They all need to fight. Healthy capitalism is fiercely competitive. Not whatever this invasive species that preys on everything else is. That sounds great if you're rich and can afford to pay for all the million subscriptions that will pop up to replace what Google offers. Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time. Also, on the topic of AI: didn't the transformers research paper come from Google? In an alternate world that would've been a trade secret locked away inside Google.
- echelon 5mo ago> Google offers an insane amount of value to people for free: YouTube, Android, Google Search, Trends, Scholar, Maps, Chrome, Translate, Gmail. These would all be paid subscription products without adsense (or some equivalent). And as paid products they would get the typical subscription enshittification over time. That's false. There are hundreds of free offerings in this and many other spaces offered by lots of other companies. There does not have to be one monopoly controlling all of it for the freemium model and advertising to work.
- majormajor 6mo ago"Possibility for abuse" seems like the right reason here. Does the benefiting of reducing a specific possibility of abuse outweigh the cost of an intervention? And here in particular, is there much cost to the intervention other than just shifting the money distribution from a zero-sum advertising arms race from one player to several? I frequently see calls to not intervene if there's not bulletproof evidence of existing abuse, but why wait? Would you want Google to own a bunch of nuclear missiles just because they might not have misused them yet?
- pixelpoet 6mo agoI am deeply saddened that it was developed by the hero of modern rendering, Eric Veach.
- j16sdiz 6mo agoI am more concern with how they make scam much less detectable. You can hyper-target your ad or scam to vulnerable individual. Unlike traditional media, like newspaper, you can post an ad with no visibility outside your target group -- which is hard to discover. The report button is just some generic "second look" and automation within the same organization, there are no oversight.
- SilverElfin 6mo agoYep. They can make every mistake imaginable and not work as hard but still win. It’s the power of concentrated capital and monopolistic behavior and what people call “moats” but really is just an unfair advantage. Why should Google or Apple be allowed to copy everyone’s AI tech and just win because of distribution through Chrome or iPhones? We need new antitrust laws and heavy taxes just on the megacorps worth $500B or more. And aggressive enforcement.
- IncreasePosts 6mo agoWhat AI tech did Google just copy?
- ivewonyoung 6mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_Is_All_You_Need /s
- georgemcbay 6mo agoNot that I'm opposed to new laws, but just having enforcement of the laws we already have would go a long way to fixing the problems. The problem is how to get to the point where there is enforcement. It definitely isn't going to happen with Republicans in power, and it also isn't a sure thing with Democrats in power either. Lina Khan was a good start for a bit there, but she certainly didn't have universal Dem support. Establishment Democrats are going to have to grow a spine and tell the Reid Hoffmanesque donor class to get fucked.
- SilverElfin 6mo agoThe current set of laws lead to the current situation in my opinion. Enforcement within the current laws means a court case that will take years and span multiple administrations, which gives it a lot of time to be killed. It doesn’t provide enough authority to immediately bring enforcement actions.
- keeda 6mo ago
- i_love_retros 6mo agoCollectively we have the power to do something about it if enough people care to. It's called democratic socialism. https://www.dsausa.org/ https://www.dsausa.org/
- TulliusCicero 6mo agoDSA would be a great org if they could fix their foreign policy takes. Doing the whole "it's both sides, really" thing after Russia invaded Ukraine just makes them look like useful idiots.
- tt24 6mo agoSaying this about a compute rental service is hilarious They have the power to do what exactly? Sell you some EC2 instances at reasonable prices? lol There’s organizations that have the power to openly kidnap and execute people and we’re being melodramatic about a few buildings with computers in them
- siliconc0w 6mo agoThey'll buy your politicians who will give them zero checks on raising energy prices or poisoning your children's minds
- sublinear 6mo agoApathy is not evidence of anything, not even ignorance.
- tt24 6mo agoHave they been doing this? Evidence?
- killjoywashere 6mo agoHow's a 170 million pieces of evidence for poisoning children's minds https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/09/google-youtube-will-pay-record-170-million-alleged-violations-childrens-privacy-law https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2019/09/...
- tt24 5mo agoHow is this related to poisoning anyone’s mind Looks like they collected some metrics. I’m fine with this
- chneu 5mo agoThe trump family is literally in office and accepting bribes from every tech company in existence. Lol how willfully ignorant can people be?
- raincole 6mo agoWait until you learn what governments are.
- applfanboysbgon 6mo agoGovernments are companies that have accountability to the public, wherein the public has direct influence over their decisionmaking, unlike regular corporations where people have no influence whatsoever (without lobbying the government to regulate them, anyways). To the extent that governments work against the people, it is largely because people in some countries are collectively very stupid and willingly support such governments.
- victorbjorklund 6mo agooh, yes, Trump famous for being held accountable.
- applfanboysbgon 6mo agoHe is politically accountable. The majority of the voting populace voted him back in and also voted for a majority of legislators whose central policy was worshipping the ground on which he stands. America is getting exactly what its people voted for, if you have a problem with that you have a problem with democracy itself.
- victorbjorklund 6mo agoIn what way? What will happen to him? As far as I know, he is not standing for a re-election anyway, so exactly zero consequences for him.
- applfanboysbgon 5mo agoTo be clear, political accountability doesn't mean "you, one person out of over 300 million, get your desired outcome". It means the over 300 million people collectively decide what he is accountable for and what happens to him. He can be removed from office by Congress after the midterms if the population shows up to vote for that happening. They won't, of course, because the American people as a whole do not want him removed from office, but the mechanism is there. He will also probably stand for re-election, and if he does he probably will win despite it being in violation of the constitution, because by all accounts the American people collectively prefer the concept of Supreme Leader Trump to the scrap of toilet paper that is their constitution. That is the nature of democracy. It gives the people what they want, even if what they want is very stupid and harmful to themselves.
- joe_mamba 6mo agoWhoever controls the spice , controls the universe.
- charlie0 6mo agoAnd the spice must flow
- irishcoffee 6mo agoI’ve always thought “man it would have been a great job selling shovels and pickaxes during the gold rush” back in the day.” I know, I know, it’s really hard having these insights. We all have our crosses to bear. <giggling emoji>
- jeffbee 6mo agoThe "picks and shovels" people from the dotcom days all went broke. The stuff they had convinced themselves and their investors was crucial turned out to be not important.
- newsclues 6mo agoWorking out for nvidia right now
- ohNoe5 6mo agoHardware is important to operation of computers and software as we know them A bunch of config management DSL startups, and web scale data storage solutions, not so much
- irishcoffee 6mo agoRight, and Google owns 25% of the hardware.
- cyberax 6mo agoCisco is doing great. Sun got acquired by Oracle. Oracle itself is also fine (apart from it is Oracle). Akamai is doing fine. From the pure software side, Macromedia got acquired. RedHat was doing fine before IBM gobbled it up. But I honestly can't remember any other "picks and shovels" software companies from pre-dotcom.
- jeffbee 6mo agoThe glass-in-the-ground people went spectacularly broke. I also suggest you look up the stock price chart for JDSU. On the software side, Ariba and Commerce One.
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- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- rattray 6mo agohttps://archive.ph/U7i8q https://archive.ph/U7i8q
- eddythompson80 6mo agoDon’t know about catching up to AWS, but given the state of Azure, anyone with enough data center investment should be able to overtake it.
- pjmlp 6mo agoAzure secret juice are Microsoft shops. When you are already into some combination of Office, Windows desktops, Active Directory, .NET, SQL Server, Github Copilot, then Azure feels like the natural cloud transition.
- jojobas 6mo agoOffice, Windows and SQL server get some hate now and then but are nowhere near as buggy as Azure.
- pjmlp 6mo agoAll cloud vendors are buggy, and if you aren't paying enough there are only bots to talk to.
- TitaRusell 6mo agoIf you want cheap that's what you get. Service costs money. Like how my local supermarket prefers hiring teenagers.
- pjmlp 6mo agoDepending on your wallet size, all cloud services are great,
- jojobas 5mo agoIt would appear that GCP and aws are in a different league of bugginess compared to Azure. Azure seems to be relying on constant human intervention, the other 2 didn't get a special mention from Pentagon. There was a recent insider article cycle on just how broken and misguided the whole Azure department is.
- siren2026 6mo agoI pray for Google to completely fail the pivot to AI. We don't need another surveillance capitalism company using AI to make us even dumber and more addicted to screens. I so hope that Google goes down. (And I pray the same for Facebook and a couple others).
- Rekindle8090 6mo ago[dead]
- bitpush 6mo agoHuh? Why are you railing against Google? Because of YouTube? How's Google Search making you addicted to screens. At this rate, you'll hate Apple for making iPhones so damn good, or Starlink for giving really good internet access. You line of thinking is - gosh, these companies are providing an excellent service, and I hate them for that?
- siren2026 6mo agoThe incentive for those Adtech is to keep you hooked as long as possible so they can sell you more ads, and making you lose your only real currency in life: time. The incentive for Apple or Microsoft is to make a good product that you will gladly pay for. This is very different. A good restaurant makes an excellent product bit it doesn't mean that I will spend 5 hours there.
- abenga 6mo agoI use Google products. Between YouTube premium and uBlock origin, I don't really see any ads at all.
- pixelbro 6mo agoGoogle Analytics has >80% market share. Most of the websites you visit are helping them build a profile of everything you do on the internet with the goal of selling targeted advertisement. That is their business, it's what pays for everything else they do. I think that is what is meant by surveillance capitalism.
- bushbaba 6mo agoGoogle banked on "Edge" for IoT as well, prior to that it was their network edge is better use them from compute. It's a failed strategy that won't work this time either.
- boulos 6mo agoThat's not the "edge" in the title. It means competitive advantage in this case.
- _pdp_ 6mo agoIn a highly competitive markets, consumers win.
- esperent 6mo agoUnless that market causes you to lose your job, of course. Or unless you want to buy RAM or a new graphics card. Or unless you are an artist, or a translator, or... But sure, if you want to buy AI tokens, you win.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- chneu 5mo agoThis isn't really true but keep thinking that. This is one of those things capitalists tell themselves so they can keep believing the shtick. This is a good example of "head in the sand on purpose" thinking.
- fxtentacle 6mo agoI feel like those articles all look at the wrong aspect: once AI companies are forced to compete on price (i.e. in 6 months), then Google’s TPU is going to be a massive advantage that’s almost impossible for Amazon or Microsoft to replace.
- baq 6mo agoAmazon has its own hardware in the pipeline, Microsoft would be stupid to not work on one, so best to assume they are at the very least a buyer of such a thing from AMD/Intel.
- phonon 6mo agoMicrosoft has https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/01/26/maia-200-the-ai-accelerator-built-for-inference/ https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/01/26/maia-200-the-ai-... already.
- esperent 6mo ago> i.e. in 6 months Why are Amazon or Microsoft going to be forced to compete on cost in six months?
- datadrivenangel 6mo agoIf the big cloud players slowly agree to compete on price then that means that OpenAI and Anthropic are suddenly in a much weaker negotiating position.
- spwa4 6mo agoGoogle has never competed on having a price advantage.
- Yizahi 6mo agoEven bigger advantage Google has, in addition to TPUs and other stuff, is bundling. Bundle paid AI tiers with other products and entice users with clever pricing tiers, and you're golden. In fact this is what Google already does. Cheapest paid AI tier - 4$ and you also get two hundred gigs of cloud storage and photo backup and office and stuff. You want more storage - sure we have that, plus some higher AI usage limits on top of that, or maybe you want average storage but much more AI tokens? We have that too. Family packs? Sure. And so on. OpenAI doesn't have a photo editor or a music streaming or or funny reels network to bundle their expensive AI with.
- quanto 6mo ago> Only Nvidia currently rivalled Google’s combination of AI hardware and integrated chip software, he added. Does the phrasing imply that Google sees itself as #1 and Nvidia as a close #2 that may rival its greatness? not to mention other big contenders.