
Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2019 Results - kgwgk
https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2019Q1_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf?cache=8ac2b86
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jcfrei
My handwaving analysis would be that advertising around search is slowing and
instead mostly growing around content - this is because the web has matured
and users are now educated on what it has to offer. They spend less time
searching and browsing the web and instead spend most of the time consuming
content (via streaming services and social feeds) through established
platforms (youtube, instagram, netflix, spotify, twitch, etc.). And Alphabet's
main content platform youtube is somewhat harder to monetize.

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tyingq
_" advertising around search is slowing"_

I think it's just finally tied directly to growth of internet use. Their YoY
gains used to exceed it because they were grabbing more above the fold space
every year, experimenting with different ad looks, etc.

I believe the well of new tricks is drying up... everything above the fold is
an ad now for high value queries.

That's not a bad place to be.. it's just not as comparatively nice as
consistently doing better than general growth.

I suppose one caveat is that they make less on mobile ads versus desktop, and
desktop share continues to shrink.

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asaph
Looks like Wall Street is considering this one a miss. $GOOG is down 6% in
after hours trading.

~~~
gniv
After going up by the same amount in the last two weeks.

I've seen this pattern in previous quarters: irrational increase in the days
before earning, then a fall back to the same price. Not sure what's happening,
could be option/day traders.

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duality
Is this "buy the rumor, sell the news" in action?

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FartyMcFarter
What was the rumor?

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dredmorbius
Whisper number.

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JabavuAdams
Is anyone else amazed that they added almost 20k employees since last year?
How?

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zachberger
As stated on past earnings calls, the growth has been driven by Google Cloud
in both technical and sales roles.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jilliandonfro/2019/02/04/google...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jilliandonfro/2019/02/04/google-
parent-alphabet-reports-surge-in-spending-and-hiring-hitting-
nearly-100000-employees/#1fa850de72e8)

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telltruth
TLDR; Revenue increased by 19% which didn't met the growth expectations
because same quarter last year revenue growth was 26%. If you don't take fines
in to account margin is improved and paid clicks are increased by 39% but the
cost per click went down to 19% yoy which seems to be the big factor in missed
expectation for the growth. GOOG headcount went up from 85K to 103K yoy.

GOOG is getting beaten right now with analysts because Amazon and FB are being
perceived to have done much better with their ad business. People on TV are
asking to reduce costs, investments like Waymo and monetize properties like
maps. They seem to have lost faith in further growth in Google's ad business
due to increasing competition from FB and Amazon.

~~~
e12e
I must say, nearly 20% quarterly revenue increase sounds pretty amazing for
such a large company (I guess not every quarter is equal - but 20% increase
every quarter means a doubling of revenue year to year). Is this typical for
all the big tech players?

Is it really not crazy - is the market(s) still expanding that much?

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myroon5
Earnings reports are quarterly, but the growth rates mentioned are annual
growth rates

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xiphias2
For me in the past few years Waymo was the most interesting growth part of
Alphabet, but after the Tesla presentation I feel that Tesla is in a better
position because of the amount of edge cases they can gather for their models.

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notfromhere
Tesla FSD is vaporware that exists just to pump the stock.

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DeonPenny
Waymo is more likely vaporware. Traditional ML isn't going to work for all the
edge case. Tesla has thousands of cars on the road. The Tesla Deep learning
play is the only way this is going to work

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cromwellian
ML without hardware side radars or redundancies like high resolution maps in
the areas they operate is what isn’t going to work.

Name a deep neural net with anywhere close to 100% object recognition
precision/recall.

You’re engaging ins hand waved reality distortion from musk that somehow their
cheap low quality sensorsuite with gaps that they shipped hundreds of
thousands of, can be patched over by software and be made to drive across
country and service millions of people in robotaxis one year from now despite
the fact that they haven’t even filed any significant l4 miles with
disengagement reports?

This seems like a market rush disaster waiting to happen. You don’t ship
mvp/beta of software that can kill people so you can gather training data.

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DeonPenny
1\. You can get 89% accuracy with a convolutional LSTM
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.4389.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1411.4389.pdf)

2\. You get multiple bites of the apple the chip is processing 200 images a
second. It had plenty of sign in the next frame to identify an issue.

3\. All Tesla have redundant side sensors and radars, and an adversarial
system for checking it's conclusions.

4\. Having don't actually need to file those things in Tesla case. Why would
you? They could easily test the functionality and tell no one and not worry
about the regulation until they've passed a certain amount of accuracy.

5\. The beta is navigation on autopilot and it's proven to be safer than
regular drivers by far.

And most importantly what do you think will happen if elon release. Self
driving on local roads in a year. Other than that what more would the car need
to do. Be able to do that without people touching the wheel. If he just
release that as a "feature" and it works there won't be a marketing issue. In
fact he already has.

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kajecounterhack
1\. 89% != 100%. If you miss a pedestrian and hit them, you're in trouble. Do
you really want a car that misidentifies things 11% of the time? The kind of
nines you're looking for in a self driving car are much higher.

2\. Multiple frames misinterpreting something the same way doesn't help you.
Also many times you can only draw 1 conclusion from many frames e.g you need N
seconds to tell a person's intent.

3\. Redundant sensors are great. Radar + camera can help give good estimation
about where things are in the world, but cameras have disadvantages (e.g
occlusion, low sun angle, etc) and radar too (resolution, poor range,
interference, etc). If you don't have redundancies for the weakness of each
sensor, you are going to have problems in the long tail.

4\. Ghost mode driving doesn't actually capture the long tail of crazy
situations, especially since their current sensors most certainly don't store
all the data needed to recreate the world. You need to drive a verrryyy long
time to see some real-world situations that break your assumptions about your
sensor robustness.

5\. Highway autopilot is more or less solved (with varying safety bars).
Surface streets are the hard part and Tesla hasn't demonstrated any progress
there beyond PR / hype.

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DeonPenny
1\. Humans aren't 100% They aren't even 89%. They are only 76% accurate.
[https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/283990](https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/283990)
and they do just fine.

2\. Multi frames means you don't misinterpret the same way. The rotation
scale, and other variance change.

3\. You do have redunancy in the sensors and something that no other sensor
besides a brain has. The ability to predict items directions and speed
relative to yours. Something no amount of sensors gives and which is the real
goal.

4\. You should point that argument to waymo not tesla. They are the only ones
looking at all the cases they can and learning from that data.

5\. Highway piloting is solved in tesla case. You know who hasn't solved it no
other automaker. No other automaker can drive from on ramp to off ramp. They
can even really change lanes.

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kajecounterhack
1\. Incorrect. Comparing human performance on _recognition_ over imagenet !=
comparing human total visual ability (object detection, which is a superset of
recognition, + tracking) to a machine. Machines are far worse at accurately
saying what + where things are + what they will do next. For example, cyclists
move very quickly. Can your system not only see them but understand their
intent with extremely high accuracy? What if your camera is occluded even
partially, what failure mode do you have?

2\. That's just wrong. If your image is washed out from low sun angle, all
200fps are washed out and you might misconstrue the red light for a green one.

3\. You need n+1 for each kind of detector resilient to different failure
modes to call yourself fault tolerant. 2 cameras both suceptible to the same
problems isn't fully fault tolerant. Camera and radar have overlapping and
joint uses but don't overlap enough e.g if radar fails camera can't do the
same things the radar can.

4\. This is unsubstantiated. You really think other sdc companies aren't
collecting data from cars on the road? What do you think all those cars in
mountain view and SF you see are for? What evidence do you have that Tesla is
"looking at all cases" \-- do they even have the infrastructure necessary to
simulate their car's behavior over long-tail situations? (Hint: rumor is it's
pretty lacking)

5\. The serious L4+ companies e.g Uber are pretty good at driving highways.
They're all working on the next phase of the problem.

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DeonPenny
5\. See this is why I know you not actually reading the papers and seeing the
comparison of their performance cause uber is doing terribly on the highway
and otherwise. Raquel Urtasun already got her program shut down for 9 months
for terrible performance. That has never happened to Tesla.

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joshuamorton
This is more due to regulatory games than performance. Tesla's aren't
regulated like L4+ autonomous vehicles, so when they kill people (which they
have!) they don't get shut down.

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MarkMc
Putting aside the EC fine, operating expenses grew 19.2% year-on-year while
revenue only grew 16.7% year-on-year. This is clearly not sustainable - if it
continues expect to see some belt-tightening at Google.

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outside1234
Look at all of those employees!! What are 100k employees doing at Google?
Especially since they have a fairly weak field team.

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azhenley
For those that are more apt at understanding these reports, could you provide
us a summary?

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reallydude
Yahoo has a fine TL;DR - [https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alphabet-google-
first-quarter...](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/alphabet-google-first-
quarter-2019-earnings-results-191938683.html)

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writepub
For a summary, try Reuters: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-
results/alphabet...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-
results/alphabet-first-quarter-revenue-misses-estimates-idUSKCN1S521N)

Eventually, It'll be hard to not argue that some part of revenue and profit
misses arise from activism against serving the US government, or opening a
China search engine.

At that point, will Google choose to pursue business interests or pander to
activists?

