The problem with Google is that their ad business brings so much revenue that no other product makes sense. They will use whatever they learn with robots to raise their ad revenue, somehow.
Google uses their insane ad revenue to subsidize the Xerox Parc / Bell Labs of the current generation. Waymo, DeepMind, Gemini Robotics. They're killing it and leading the entire market.
It's not just researchers. Engineers at Google get to spin up products and throw spaghetti at walls, too. Google has more money than God to throw around.
Google's ad dominance will probably never go away unless antitrust action by the FTC/DOJ/EU force a breakup. So they'll continue to lead as long as they can subsidize and outspend everyone else. Their investments compound and give an almost unassailable moat into deep tech problems.
Google might win AI and robotics and transportation and media and search 2.0. They'll own everything.
Google has been looking for post-ad post-search revenue for almost a decade now. They certainly won't dominate forever and have several signals flashing red for a few years now.
Google has been looking for post-ad post-search revenue for almost a decade now
With a reasonable degree of success. In their last quarter (see https://abc.xyz/investor/earnings/) 25% of their revenue was non-ads, and that percentage has been consistently increasing.
That is much higher than I expected. Thank you to share the link. Can you imagine anyone saying "Media company XYZ has been looking for post-ad post-search revenue for almost a decade now"? It makes no sense. To me, Google is like a post-film/TV/newspaper media company that, unsurprisingly, makes most of its money from adverts.
YouTube has bigger revenues than Netflix. While the majority of that revenue is from ads, they get it by providing immense value in the form of near-unlimited entertainment.
If Chatgpt replaces Google search then it will be effectively signing it's own death warrant.
ML models like chatGPT rely on the open web for training data, particularly for information about recent events. But models like chatGPT are horrible about linking to their sources. That means that sources that rely on ad revenue or even donations to exist will effectively disappear as chatGPT steals all of the traffic. With no cash flow, the sites with current data disappear. With no new training data, chatGPT stagnates.
ChatGPT is basically a parasite on the free and open web - taking content but not giving back.
Gcloud is a running business, and AI is a billable service in it. There's a strong incentive to branch out from 1 line of business, especially as AIe can replace regular Google search and the web browsing that shows Google ads.
Search is in real danger of mostly obsolescence. Ads aren't safe.
They’ll never make their money back. Autonomous driving is mostly software and will be commoditized very shortly after it works well.
There’s not enough money paid to drivers in the world today to repay the investment in autonomous driving from direct revenues. It’ll be an expected feature of most cars, and priced at epsilon.
Autonomous driving and the attendant safety improvements will turn out to be a gift to the world paid for by Google ad revenue, startup investors, and later, auto companies.
I agree here, because the profit margin on taxi services is too low. Well, on an unrealistically long time horizon, like 50 years, they might make it back, but surely much worse returns that investing that same money into US Treasury bonds.
> Autonomous driving is mostly software and will be commoditized very shortly after it works well.
I disagree here. To be clear, when we talk about AI/ML here, I separate it into a few parts: (1) the code that does training, (2) the training data, (3) the resulting model weights, (4) the code that does the inference. As I understand, self driving uses a lot of inference. (Not an expert, but please correct me if wrong.)
How can Waymo's software be "commoditized very shortly after it works well" if competitors don't have (2) and (3)? The training data that Waymo has incredibly valuable. (Tesla and some Chinese car companies also have mountains of it.)
You point out yourself that Waymo doesn’t have a monopoly on training data. And the trained model is software, of which the price-to-use trends towards epsilon, even when it’s very expensive to make. For example Google search, maps, docs, YouTube. An exception is Netflix, but there the value provided by a subscription is access to novelty, which is not intrinsic to driving software.
My bet is on transparent, contextual ads. Assuming the product from all of this is having a robot in your house, when you're doing something like cooking, it will say things like "have you considered trying an oat milk base? Oatly is a great option. I can Doordash some for you if you'd like..."
