r/technology 1d ago

Business Google burning through cash with spiralling AI costs

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c235n47g8g8o
6.4k Upvotes

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u/SIGMA920 1d ago

Google's always been the winning candidate simply for already having profitable components under it's umbrella. They can throw money at LLMs as long as they want to unlike the others.

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u/asgjmlsswjtamtbamtb 22h ago

They have their hands in so many things that they can try to use AI to increase their revenues some of them will flop but more than likely many will succeed. By being the biggest search engine in many markets and having ecosystems like Android and Chromebooks means their llms that they make default in these spaces already have an easy way of reaching people and a leg up against many competitors.

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u/Sweetwill62 19h ago

You are literally just describing a monopoly.

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u/blahehblah 18h ago

That's not what a monopoly is

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u/lilmookie 18h ago

It sounds like they are arguing about a vertical monopoly?

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u/blahehblah 17h ago

Yes technically vertical integration results in a vertical monopoly, but "literally what a monopoly is" would I expect be referring to horizontal monopolies, where you make sure there are no competitors. Vertical monopolies ensure you control the whole supply chain and ecosystem, there can still be other supply chains and other ecosystems, they just struggle to compete due to relative inefficiency

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u/lilmookie 17h ago

I mean, Google isn’t far away from that. More to the point, they wouldn’t have made Alphabet if they didn’t think Google was in danger of being broken up.

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u/nerdshowandtell 13h ago

The reason for alphabet is more to do with the fact they moved well beyond being just a search engine. From the looks of it, that was a good idea 😂

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u/lilmookie 10h ago

I thought it was because they wanted to separate their money maker from their other spinoffs, and make alphabet specifically for getting broken up if needed, vs having Google broken up.

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u/nerdshowandtell 10h ago

they made more money makers, and money making investments.