| ▲ | Google banks on AI edge to catch up to cloud rivals Amazon and Microsoft(ft.com) |
| 79 points by donsupreme 4 hours ago | 51 comments |
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| ▲ | rattray 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| https://archive.ph/U7i8q |
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| ▲ | eddythompson80 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Don’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. |
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| ▲ | siren2026 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I 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). |
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| ▲ | ViktorRay 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Whenever I read about how powerful these companies are, it sends chills down my spine. |
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| ▲ | tt24 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Saying 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 | | |
| ▲ | 100ms an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | That's not an ideal tone for here. From my perspective the most incredible thing is the concentration of IO. I might like at some point for elements of my computer usage to remain private, it would be nice if that ability were preserved. A bit hard to accomplish when 1 out of 4 bits processed globally all run through the same network | |
| ▲ | fnordpiglet an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | When their customers start using those buildings with computers in them to autonomously determine who to kidnap and execute, I suspect you might understand their point. I’d also note we are one refusal away from the US president declaring DPA control over frontier model providers and their infrastructure a national defense necessity and under his personal control. | |
| ▲ | siliconc0w 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They'll buy your politicians who will give them zero checks on raising energy prices or poisoning your children's minds | | |
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| ▲ | raincole an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Wait until you learn what governments are. | | |
| ▲ | applfanboysbgon 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Governments 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. |
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| ▲ | bigyabai 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | AdSense 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. | | |
| ▲ | j16sdiz 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I 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. | |
| ▲ | pixelpoet 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I am deeply saddened that it was developed by the hero of modern rendering, Eric Veach. | |
| ▲ | parineum 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Any sane nation would have banned it decades ago Why? | | |
| ▲ | majormajor 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | "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? | |
| ▲ | bigyabai 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | AdSense 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. | | |
| ▲ | streptomycin an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | But 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. | |
| ▲ | SilverElfin an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | They 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. |
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| ▲ | echelon 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Google 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 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | >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. |
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| ▲ | SilverElfin 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yep. 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. | | |
| ▲ | jfrbfbreudh 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You mean, the inventor of the transformer technology that made ChatGPT possible, is copying ChatGPT’s technology? | | |
| ▲ | SilverElfin an hour ago | parent [-] | | Gemini is a copy of ChatGPT. And ChatGPT was a product invented on top of many previous ideas. The fact that one paper among many was written at Google isn’t relevant to my point. Google entered the competition in AI products late. And now they will use their power unfairly to try and make it win. When they bundle an AI Chatbot into their existing contracts for Google workspace, they are competing unfairly. When the Chrome browser steers you towards Google properties by default, they are competing unfairly. Etc. Those unfair monopolistic actions let them come into the market years late with a viable competitor to ChatGPT or other products. And let’s not give them too much credit for transformers. A handful of researchers were paid by Google while they came up with that paper. Google didn’t really do anything to push for it and neither Google leaders nor shareholders cared much about it at the time. Not to mention, transformers themselves were just a continuation of other prior steps in ML, from what I’ve read. | | |
| ▲ | nl 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Let's not give too much credit to Bell Labs. A handful of researchers were paid to develop transistors and... That's exactly how fundamental research works. Transformers is possibly the most significant advancement in machine learning since AlexNet. Bundling products is valid but different critism. | |
| ▲ | hnav 28 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | google literally had two divisions doing ai research. It is (was) risk averse and had its hand forced by the runaway success of oai. |
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| ▲ | nl 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There are many valid criticisms of Google, but copying AI tech isn't one of them. | |
| ▲ | georgemcbay 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not 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. | | |
| ▲ | keeda 10 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I will preface by saying that someone with Lina Khan is sorely needed; Big Tech and other monopolies have gotten way too Big and seriously need to be reined in. That said, from all the informed takes I've seen, Lina Khan was seriously... flawed (putting it charitably) in her strategy and tactics. To the extent that some observers wondered if she was deliberately sabotaging the agency just to highlight the need for new, more effective laws. She did have a novel theory of consumer harm, but that requires new legislation to enforce. Instead the way she went about it -- including by flouting due process -- was extremely counter-productive. That was a big reason she was neither very effective in her goals (other than creating a lot of noise) nor have high political support from any side. | |
| ▲ | SilverElfin an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | The 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. |
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| ▲ | IncreasePosts 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What AI tech did Google just copy? | | |
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| ▲ | i_love_retros 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Collectively we have the power to do something about it if enough people care to. It's called democratic socialism. https://www.dsausa.org/ | |
| ▲ | morkalork 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies |
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| ▲ | joe_mamba 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Whoever controls the spice , controls the universe. |
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| ▲ | irishcoffee 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I’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> |
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| ▲ | kirubakaran 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Even the original gold rush pickaxe guy Sam Brannan went broke, and he practically had a monopoly on pickaxes by buying up the entire supply: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Brannan | | | |
| ▲ | jeffbee 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The "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. | | |
| ▲ | cyberax 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Cisco 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. | | |
| ▲ | bryanlarsen 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Cisco is doing great. https://totalrealreturns.com/s/CSCO | |
| ▲ | shellwizard 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 3Com / US Robotics - dead Nortel - dead Global crossing - dead | |
| ▲ | jeffbee 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The 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. | | | |
| ▲ | warkdarrior 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Microsoft - doing fine Netscape - dead (server) and/or dying (Mozilla) Intel - almost dead Palm - dead Qualcomm - still around | | |
| ▲ | nerdsniper 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | INTC shot up >300% in the past 8 months and is now at its highest stock price ever, fwiw. | |
| ▲ | cyberax 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I guess Netscape counts. Palm produced devices, so it was not really picks&shovels. Who else? Borland quietly withered away, but it had never been focused on tools specifically for the Internet. |
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| ▲ | newsclues 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Working out for nvidia right now | | |
| ▲ | ohNoe5 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Hardware 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 | | |
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