Sergey better really go into "founder mode" or else Thomas Kurian (head of GCP) will continue to eat Deepmind's lunch.
Between selling TPUs to external companies and now hosting competitor models, Gemini just doesnt have the full faith of the Alphabet capital allocators, and I can't really blame them. A mature company like google would rather just expand their extremely profitable cloud business rather than dump billions into a black hole on the off chance they achieve RSI or superintelligence or whatever.
> 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.
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.
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.
Sergey better really go into "founder mode" or else Thomas Kurian (head of GCP) will continue to eat Deepmind's lunch.
Between selling TPUs to external companies and now hosting competitor models, Gemini just doesnt have the full faith of the Alphabet capital allocators, and I can't really blame them. A mature company like google would rather just expand their extremely profitable cloud business rather than dump billions into a black hole on the off chance they achieve RSI or superintelligence or whatever.
Gotta love the disclaimer at the bottom:
Things that you only say because you are contractually forced to say them.
Or don't want to crash stock price.
OpenAI buys from Azure because of the Microsoft investment deal.
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.
Microsoft has had ZDR for inference since pretty much the beginning. Just needed to fill out a form and get approved.
isn't the largest portion of openAI's reach to (overwhelming cloud provider leader AWS) enterprise customers via amazon bedrock?
OpenAI only launched on bedrock ~3 months ago, so I doubt it. It has been running on azure since day 1.
> 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.
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).
A company is allowed to do two things
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).
Is that a long term prediction? Are you saying that physical infra will always lag demand from here on?
>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.
Preparing for Oracle bankruptcy.
There's always a silver lining!
I could only hope...
"OpenAI models will soon be available in the Gemini Agent"
They definitely need to have a better name if they're going to use 3p models
New to Google?
How are they trusting Google not to destill them
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
Isn't distillation more of a black box type affair?
Distillation does not require access to weights.
Doesn’t really matter what happens at the GPU level when Google can see all API traffic.
Except google cloud doesn't use Nvidia GPUs but TPUs.
Google has both. Afaik we don't know whether OpenAI models will run on TPUs or GPUs here.
Probably a very strict contract, and letting OpenAI read all the session logs like they do for their own customers.
GCP already hosts Anthropic models so probably trusts and lawyers.
First answer this: How are they trusting OpenRouter not to distill them?
America is a high-trust society.
More like - America is a high-litigation society.
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.
Google Cloud couldn't give a shit about Google Deepmind, and backdooring Clouds customers only stands to hurt Cloud.
Contracts and lawyers are more powerful than any technical tool.
Yeah like the copyright lawyers of content owners that got their works trained on?
How many trillions of dollars were those content owners worth?
Enough. They just weren’t working in coordination.
Does this mean OpenAI is going to use TPU now?
We need a new acronym
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
Add Anthropic and you get MANGO. MSFT, Anthropic, NVIDIA, Google, OpenAI.
Let’s go with Mango!
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.
Who said it’s new? :)
However if you look at the trust busting era what preceded it was this exact kind of private “cooperation” to prevent government involvement
This is like that SNL skit with Tim Meadows where Will Ferrell has the F on his shirt on the kids TV show and keeps getting in the inappropriate order
Add in Meta (Muse app is a winner)
MOM-NG GNOMM NGMOM MGNOM MGMNO MGMON ONMGM NOMGM NOMMG
Is this the begging of the end of Gemini?
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.
GCP has been hosting Anthropic models for a while.
Google owns Anthropic stock.
No? Why would you think that’s the case? Gemini fills its own niche
Gemini and GPT fill the same niche. They are direct competitors.
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.