Let's imagine for a second that this a few billion dollars per year to Google is correct. Why do you assume that it covers everything to be done by Google itself - from hosting to running actual servers? Apple may very well pay Google a licensing fee, take a trained LLM and run inference themselves locally or even at a yet another 3rd party for example a datacenter corporation or any mix of these. And then a true real cost of running just the inference on every Apple device would be separated into a completely different org payment flows, very obscured and higher than just a license fee.

I'm not saying that this is what really happens. I'm saying that believing a CEO is as foolish and as grounded in reality as believing Ed Zitron.

> Why do you assume that it covers everything to be done by Google itself - from hosting to running actual servers?

I don't, and that's the point, isn't it?

It's the keys to a substantial chunk of the kingdom for $1B a year. Literally they are getting, for a very small price, the right to distill their own models from Gemini.

Is there money in this for someone with a data centre? Possibly. Is there money in it for NVIDIA? Possibly.

But either way, that's not OpenAI or Anthropic, is it?