6 ms·
Quoting: In addition, Alphabet has reached an agreement to sell $10 billion of stock to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. in a private placement, comprised of $5 billion
by plmpsu 4mo ago
Quoting:
In addition, Alphabet has reached an agreement to sell $10 billion of stock to Berkshire Hathaway Inc. in a private placement, comprised of $5 billion in Class A Common Stock at a price of $351.81 per share and $5 billion in Class C Capital Stock at a price of $348.20 per share.
This investment by Berkshire Hathaway adds to the position it has built since Q3 2025.
- bel8 4mo agoThey know Google has a ton of data to train LLMs on. Recently I have been asking YouTube's new AI about some videos ("when is Steam metrics mentioned in the video?" for example), which means they also index videos. This is an unthinkable amount of data. I'm actually impressed at how bad Alphabet is with LLMs since they invented the thing as we know AND have all the data to train on, yet OpenAI and Anthropic are eating their pie.
- CamperBob2 4mo agoNot only that, but the same webmasters who try to shoo AI crawlers away actively court Google's bots.
- cj 4mo agoReally? Every business owner I know outside of HN wants to be discoverable by LLMs.
- iamacyborg 4mo agoBeing discoverable is one thing, having your content stolen wholesale is another
- Polizeiposaune 4mo agoAnd having your content rendered inaccessible to humans by a DDoS attack from overly aggressive webcrawlers that ignore robots.txt is yet another.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- losvedir 4mo agoMost of the economy is not journalists or people who sell "content" online. In most cases I can think of - retailer, restaurant, hotel, plumber, any local small business, they want their content ingested. That means the AI chatbot knows about them and they can be in answers potentially.
- mitchell_h 4mo agoI use anthropic's models daily, and sometimes switch to Gemini. Google is losing the marketing front BADLY, but their AI service is surprisingly great. It's far cheaper than anthropic for one. and for my kind of research it's just better.
- enos_feedler 4mo agowho cares about marketing when you have distribution? Probably a smart move to pump dollars into the product and not the marketing.
- jgalt212 4mo agoin high margin businesses, customer acquisition is everything.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 4mo agoIf your product becomes commoditized, it’s no longer a high margin business
- mandeepj 4mo ago> If your product becomes commoditized Depends on the product - whether protein bars, salty chips, cellular service, or IPhone or something else. If your product has a flavor, it’s never going to get commoditized. Coke still tastes better than Pepsi.
- collingreen 4mo agoThis is the power of a brand. Kirkland and some private label products are literally the same as the competitor products and yet are perceived differently. Even in your Pepsi vs Coke example, Pepsi routinely wins in blind taste tests but there are more "Coke people". It will be interesting to see if the LLM companies can establish their own "brand" and how they will do that. LLM voice is a thing but not sure if it's a good thing people will use to hang their self identity on. Distillation of models and constant training also make this complicated. Claude code is winning on harness and ux right now but it seems precarious and also easy to commoditize. I think elon tried to add branding to his chatbot pretty intelligently by being iconically crude/evil/"anti woke" since it's both highly visible and less likely to be copied. We live in fascinating times!
- MagicMoonlight 4mo agoEveryone mocked them for paying for YouTube for years with no real income. Now it’s the most valuable data source in the world.
- jonwachob91 4mo agoI've also asked the youtube ai about when some things are mentioned in videos, and upon verification the ai is just hallucinating.
- tekacs 4mo agoI don't think they 'index' videos, per se. They just point the model at the video's transcript on demand when you ask a question, I believe. Doesn't change any of your conclusions, though. You're absolutely right, they have an absolute ton of data.
- gniv 4mo ago> I don't think they 'index' videos, per se. I'm pretty sure they do. They already index metadata (you can see it in the web search results) so indexing the transcript is relatively easy.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4mo agoI wouldn't be surprised if Google's logs alone are a substantial portion of all data created daily...
- ecommerceguy 4mo agopretty sure its only for videos with cc enabled.
- f0rgot 4mo agoAre you sure it’s not using transcripts? That would be equally useful but technologically less impressive.
- tayo42 4mo agoTurning all of those annoyingly verbose and long YouTube videos into text that could be searched, summarized and referenced easily would be amazing
- marcus_holmes 4mo agoKodak problem. Kodak invented the digital camera but their revenue came from making photographic film. They were unable to take advantage of their invention because it would cannibalise their revenue. That didn't stop other people and the revenue died anyway. Google's main revenue is ads based on search. LLMs are a competitor to search. Creating better LLMs will cut into search volumes. In any large organisation this is extraordinarily difficult to manage - they have to incentivise the new tech that is actively harming the current revenues, while maintaining as much of the old revenues as possible, without creating internal conflict between these two parts of the organisation that will kill it. Though in fairness to Google they do seem to realise this and are trying to adapt - they're letting the LLM folks mess with search. It'll be interesting to see how this goes.
- wrsh07 4mo agoThis is a sensible-seeming take at first blush, but it doesn't hold up to any scrutiny (or maybe my scrutiny is faulty - you tell me!) Sundar and many of his executives have certainly read or heard of The Innovator's Dilemma, and I expect they're all moderately paranoid that it will be their downfall. Also, that's not it. Google has a great ai app called Gemini where they have at various points hosted the top ai image generation model (certainly for speed, and for a while for accuracy) and have innovated with features like deep research They are monetizing their ai conversations more effectively than OpenAI could dream of via ads and chat in Google search. They are heavily investing in compute and talent. When they've added llm results to Google search it has _increased_ engagement and re-engagement. What part of the competition are they blissfully ignoring? (I have counter arguments to some of these points, but I would rather hear other people's)
- marcus_holmes 4mo agoI heard Google search volumes by humans were declining, but I can't find the reference now so may be wrong. It's definitely changing the entire SEO industry. Are they actually implementing ads in chat yet? I haven't seen an ad in Gemini yet. Again, the results I've seen is that LLM results in search have resulted in more zero-click searches (as a proportion of all searches), which isn't increasing engagement? But again, I may be wrong, what are you basing your assertion on? I didn't say they were blissfully ignoring anything. I gave them credit for knowing the situation they're in and doing something about it. The problem that I was talking about (probably badly getting my point across) is that it's internal conflict and strife that causes the pain here. One part of the company is incentivised on increasing revenue on the existing business. The other part of the company is incentivised on increasing revenue for the new business. But the new business is at the expense of the old business, so it sets up internal conflict where each part of the business tries to protect its own incentives. And Google has always been afflicted with rife internal politics.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4mo agoMy guess: The company culture means that the best people went to other companies.
- marysol5 4mo agoGoogle has been diabolical with forming teams to develop a product, then disbanding the team, and then moonlighting the product right after deployment. cries in Google Glass Wild that Meta has that product now decades later, which isn't even half of what Google offered.
- ApolloFortyNine 4mo agoI'm guessing one goal of the semi recent AI translated subtitles on every video, is now every video has a transcription. It's actually incredibly useful if you just want to summarize a video, or my use case, want a text tutorial of something that's a video.
- marysol5 4mo agoTheir transcribing and summarisation of Google Meetings is pretty good. I have a boss who loves to rattle on for ages, and it gives a breakdown of what on earth he was on about
- imtringued 4mo agoYoutube has had AI generated transcripts with autotranslation for the subtitles for years, not to mention the forced AI dubbing on mobile phones. Doing a little bit of RAG on the transcript hardly sounds impressive.
- hirako2000 4mo agoYet, Gemini can't even get YouTube URLs right half of the times.
- nimchimpsky 4mo ago[dead]
- alecco 4mo ago> They know Google has a ton of data to train LLMs on. And they have a massive amounts of TPUs. And yet... their models are way behind.
- marysol5 4mo agoHow good is YT's data though? Have you seen their Auto Caption? It's utterly incapable of understanding speech. Auto Dubbing on the other hand is incredible, translating Russian/Ukranian speech with different voices and accents for each speaker, during a fire fight is wild.
- hirako2000 4mo agoThat voice though is atrocious.
- gniv 4mo ago> Have you seen their Auto Caption? It's utterly incapable of understanding speech. How recently have you looked? I think nowadays it's quite good.
- logicchains 4mo agoGoogle doesn't suck at LLMs, they suck at customer service. There was a period where Gemini Pro was the best LLM out there, before they gutted it with quantization. It's like they didn't realize that "provide a great product, get people hooked then cut the quality" doesn't work when switching costs are so low. As with GCP, putting the wants of SREs over the wants of customers is not how you gain lots of customers.
- amelius 4mo ago> I'm actually impressed at how bad Alphabet is with LLMs Not my impression. Lately I think Gemini is superior to ChatGPT and Claude in coding (I'm mostly using it with scientific stuff in Python).
- sirsinsalot 4mo agoI think Google is doing the right thing. Using LLMs for coding is the shiny low hanging fruit but it isn't what is going to make the tech ubiquitous. That'll be finding applications of it to real data problems. Google knows LLMs are the new UI, not the new IDE.
- rvba 4mo agoAlphabet still cant fix search in Android Play store, so it works
- wffurr 4mo agoYou are assuming that Play store search is even broken from their perspective. I bet all their internal signals on it are positive, as in they make money on the fraud and scams, and crack down occasionally just enough to retain user trust.
- TacticalCoder 4mo ago> I'm actually impressed at how bad Alphabet is with LLMs ... I'm still on Anthropic models to code but I'm on Gemini 3.5 Flash for everything else. How can you say Google is bad at LLM when their little flash model is literally SOTA on many benchmarks? > ... yet OpenAI and Anthropic are eating their pie. They're eating nobody's pie: it's a new pie. Google is a $4.5 trillion company, the 2nd biggest in the world as I type this. Seen that fact and seen how good Gemini 3.5 Flash is, I'm not really sure Google is "bad at LLMs".
- okdood64 4mo ago> yet OpenAI and Anthropic are eating their pie I'm actually impressed by how much the Hackernews crowd is sleeping on Google & Gemini. Yes, it's lagging behind in coding, but it's consistently much better and more reliable at literally everything else. Also there was a period of time when Gemini was the best model out there...
- anthonypasq 4mo ago[dead]
- polski-g 4mo agoIt's pretty hard for the nerd crowd to believe that only 4% of traffic to GPT is coding related.
- travelalberta 4mo agoI would have assumed that it was like 50%... I always assume everyone knows how to code or is code adjacent in some way. Remind me to go for a walk today...
- JumpCrisscross 4mo agoIt's genuinely interesting to see Google fund this with equity versus debt.
- 3ffd 4mo agoReally? lol. Tech firms should always have a buffer and never get too close to the optimal debt ratio. I think they have learned a lot re. what happens if you are asleep at the wheel now.
- JumpCrisscross 4mo ago> Really? Yes. Their competition is deploying debt and Google has low leverage. They also have $100+ billion cash on their balance sheet. > Tech firms should always have a buffer and never get too close to the optimal debt ratio ...why is this especially applicable to tech firms? (Or a tech firm like Google?)
- panarky 4mo agoIt's also interesting watching Alphabet buy back $100 billion of stock over the last two years, when the price was half what it is today, only to turn around and sell shares now at the higher price. I know GAAP accounting won't recognize any capital gain on these treasury operations, but from an economic standpoint this financial judo creates a lot of value for existing shareholders.
- swyx 4mo agogoogle stock is $376 a share rn. berkshire got a favorable discount here. is this... normal? they didnt have an obligation to offer it to the market to find the best price?
- simpsond 4mo agoLarge block trades happen off exchange often. Secondaries like this are common enough.
- pm90 4mo agoif they sold that much in the open market it would probably decrease the price
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- gniv 4mo agoThe deal might have been signed a month ago, just before earnings, when the stock was about that price.
- christkv 4mo agoWhy are they able to do this without offering it to the market being a public company.
- cmiles8 4mo agoThese special placements are essentially a form of financing.