Prediction: google cloud will pivot to being a hyperscaler versus a model + hyperscaler. Kind of like how xAI started hosting anthropic workloads with colossus cluster.
bc the alpha is not the model, the alpha is having the physical infra (chips, power, etc).
But x.ai also hosts Grok? Why would google stop developing their own models? I think you're right that Google will try to make money from their infrastructure (that's basically what Google Cloud is too).
>Kind of like how xAI started hosting anthropic workloads with colossus cluster.
Google has been hosting part of Anthropic's load long before that deal. They had a big degradation due to compiler bug for TPUs in an optimization they made to work around TPUs not being able sample from the logits efficiently.
> Enterprises with Google Cloud spend commitments will be able to draw down their GCP commitments for these purchases.
This is a fairly big move by Google... It means revenue they have already booked and reported to shareholders they now might have to give away - potentially all of it. Bean counters hate that!
“Reported to shareholders” doesn’t really mean anything. There are thousands of such line items on financial reports. The ones that matter, such as recognized revenue, don’t count future bookings. It is understood that customers renege on these commitments all the time.
Google is simply telling customers - there’s a new Google Cloud service, and you can use it under your existing account.
This is speculation, but funnily enough Gemini models show the least evidence of being distilled from OAI or Anthropic compared to everything else in the market.
I feel this is correct. Google has probably the most data of any company in the world. For better or worse, they don't need to train on the outputs of other models.
Nvidia GPUs let you load encrypted weights onto them and to decrypt on chip so Google would need to have some sort of Nvidia management firmware attack to read from HBM while the GPU is live
I don't believe threat of litigation alone explains the extent of it.
The way an American company, esp a reputable one like Google, conducts itself internally is different. There will be much more internal backlash to do the wrong thing way before litigation.
The strategy that I’ve heard said out loud now by all the major technology companies is “we’re all doing it (AI) together”
In my view this was more or less the political result of the White House summit
So I think we’re seeing what is basically going to be a giant amorphous set of collaborations such that nobody gets taken down, and the whole market doesn’t collapse
If Alphabet, OAI, MSFT, AMZ…etc all agree to be interoperable then they will be acting more or less as a single body in tension.
Whether that’s good or not is a question of your worldview but I think that’s the strategy
Giant companies working together isn’t an AI-age phenomenon. Go back 10, 20, 30 years and you’ll see that despite the public perception of competitiveness all the largest tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Amazon) buy/sell to each other, sign partnerships and have tight economic interdependencies.
Why would it? The point of Gemini is provide user facing services cheaper than if they were paying OpenAI, make some money on the side with API credits and position themselves as a leader when investors want to see AI everywhere.
Google Cloud is competing with AWS. Amazon has Bedrock so Google needs to keep up with them by serving both Claude and GPT, along with Gemini and open models.
I don't understand all the wild speculation and question here - openai is selling a shit ton of inference through third parties. these third parties want to provide inference to their customers who use gcp (and don't want to also inference through bedrock or azure ai foundary.
these are all zdr engagements and thus "enterprise" contracts.
basically it boils down to - anthropic already provides inference direct through GCP, Azure, and AWS - so to compete openai is doing the same.
OpenAI sells and reaches enterprise customers via GCP.
Enterprises want zero data retention guarantees and they're already on AWS or GCP, so this is how OpenAI reaches those customers and makes more money.
bc the alpha is not the model, the alpha is having the physical infra (chips, power, etc).
Google has been hosting part of Anthropic's load long before that deal. They had a big degradation due to compiler bug for TPUs in an optimization they made to work around TPUs not being able sample from the logits efficiently.
This is a fairly big move by Google... It means revenue they have already booked and reported to shareholders they now might have to give away - potentially all of it. Bean counters hate that!
Google is simply telling customers - there’s a new Google Cloud service, and you can use it under your existing account.
They definitely need to have a better name if they're going to use 3p models
The way an American company, esp a reputable one like Google, conducts itself internally is different. There will be much more internal backlash to do the wrong thing way before litigation.
Google, NVIDIA, OpenAI, MSFT…
GNOM…oh wait no
The strategy that I’ve heard said out loud now by all the major technology companies is “we’re all doing it (AI) together”
In my view this was more or less the political result of the White House summit
So I think we’re seeing what is basically going to be a giant amorphous set of collaborations such that nobody gets taken down, and the whole market doesn’t collapse
If Alphabet, OAI, MSFT, AMZ…etc all agree to be interoperable then they will be acting more or less as a single body in tension.
Whether that’s good or not is a question of your worldview but I think that’s the strategy
However if you look at the trust busting era what preceded it was this exact kind of private “cooperation” to prevent government involvement
MOM-NG GNOMM NGMOM MGNOM MGMNO MGMON ONMGM NOMGM NOMMG
Google Cloud is competing with AWS. Amazon has Bedrock so Google needs to keep up with them by serving both Claude and GPT, along with Gemini and open models.
these are all zdr engagements and thus "enterprise" contracts.
basically it boils down to - anthropic already provides inference direct through GCP, Azure, and AWS - so to compete openai is doing the same.