Fucking idiots, the entire management of Google is far worse than useless, more like economically suicidal.
Finally google is losing money
Don’t be
evilprofitableFeels like the innovative part of google does not exist any more.
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Web search was the last big innovative thing they did. The other good shit since was bought up, lol, easier to buy than innovative. Capitalists hate competing because they might lose.
What about “Attention Is A You Need”, the white paper that kick-started the whole generative AI and LLM thing? OpenAI’s GPT models are built off of that architecture, like pretty much everything that came after it.
Like sure, modern Google is notoriously bad at building the actual end products, but it publishes a lot of research and some of it pushes others forward quite a lot.
The LLM page was published in 2019 right? 7 years ago!
2017, actually. But the search engine (supposedly the last innovation according to the previous comment) has seen most of its leaps forward in late 90s to early 2000s, which is a lot earlier.
Also it’s pretty hard to find a more clear example of Google sharing well done research than the white paper that started the current AI bubble. But they do publish a lot of stuff.
I think it was 2017.
Yea, and the main discovery being transformers (GPT predecessor). That allowed for the groundbreaking technology of AlphaFold to come into being, for which a Nobel prize was awarded to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper (who just left Google DeepMind to join Anthropic).
Okay my bad, thx.
Here I toast to the first of many!
Is it too late to short?
Feels like this article got too excited about the headline and the actual meat of the text is lacking in context.
First negative quarter since when? Obviously Google didn’t spawn wholesale making money. Had to look around and it’s their first negative cash quarter since 2004 when it went public. (I assume there’s no real public data before then)
The ars article says
To be clear, Google is still profitable—wildly so.
How can something be profitable, but also have negative cash flow?
Legitimately confused here. Is “cash flow” some hyper specific business term for a very narrow type of money exchange, while profit comes from a different line item?
This is a rare miss from ars, but a HUGE miss.
How can something be profitable, but also have negative cash flow?
It’s been about thirty years since I took an accounting class, but I think capital expenditures like this AI spending are amortized (deferred?) over several years and don’t fully count towards present expenses. So the chunk that counts for this quarter/year can still be small enough to make the company profitable (income > expenses). Free cash flow I would guess is money that came in minus money actually spent, so something like a $1m capital expenditure might count as $100k for this year’s expenses but the full $1m for calculating cash flow.
Yes, that’s essentially it. Also, for instance, if a company buys something in one month and pays for it the next, then the costs apply to the first month, but it affects the cash flow on the second.
Why can they spend money now, but make it so on paper it’s as if they spent it next quarter?
Capital expenditures are for things that are expected to last a long time, like buildings and vehicles, so I guess the accounting rules around them are meant to allow the costs to be realized over a similarly long time. The idea is probably that companies would be less likely to invest in capital if it meant taking a big hit all at once. But I’m not an accountant.
The question is what would happen if they didn’t spend on AI.
People got used to instant answers from chatgpt and perplexity. If Google didn’t follow, their market share would slowly drop
Would it? I turned off the AI answers from Google and most of the people I know also ask how to turn it off.
In my circle, most of the people I know are more annoyed by it than helped by it.
Also, they’re getting sued in the EU by giving incorrect answers in the AI summary, cause that’s actual info FROM Google instead of answers Google is pointing to.
Sure, there’s Gemini that people are actively reaching out to for answers, but cramming it into their main product is way more of a miss for me and the people I know in real life.
I use Gemini for search more then google these days. Wading through all the outdated and useless results is very annoying.
So you just let Gemini summarize and then make up and add random shit to the outdated and useless results for you?
Very efficiently lazy, indeed
Even people who use AI in search would fall into that trap. The output is one thing, how you take it is another. I sounds like people mostly don’t check sources, which is the biggest problem. Not saying that person does or doesn’t check sources. Aside from that, Google forcing AI into search is fundamentally the opposite of their business model. If they don’t direct people to sites to buy stuff, how do they expect the sites that they are scrapping to survive? So they scrap and don’t pay and kill the source due to excessive energy demands? Only like Amazon could survive that. Google’s search should be a utility and Google should be broken up. In the meantime, I highly recommend people use DuckDuckGo or StartPage or Kagi (paid), or any other search engine that hasn’t been on a mission to destroy SEO in favor of advertising and AI.
That’s not what the person you responded to said.
Well with all the money they pumped into ai they could have instead worked on making their search engine better at returning relevant and accurate results. Then when people clocked the fact that ai was giving them 50% bullshit, they would realise the juice is worth the squeeze with actually getting accurate info
making their search engine better at returning relevant and accurate results
This isn’t the goal. The goal is monetization. Giving good results is useless to them if they don’t make piles of money doing it.
Which ironically means you’re getting 50% bullshit from Google as well, but AI delivers it much faster.
(I’m agreeing with you if that isn’t clear.)
Oh for sure!
Very true search is basically useless these days especially for technical stuff.
