MBI Daily Dose (July 01, 2025)
Last week, UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published an interesting report titled "Strategic market status investigation into Google's general search services". CMA has been historically quite useful in understanding search market dynamics. While I do want to note that the regulator has bit of an incentive to make Google look more entrenched, here are some interesting excerpts from the report:
"The research also found that all consumers reported still using traditional search engines alongside AI assistants. In other words, traditional search engines and AI assistants are perceived as complementary rather than fully substitutable. For example, although consumers do sometimes use AI assistants for ‘search-like’ tasks, they may resort to traditional general search engines to confirm that the output they receive is reliable, and/or carry out a ‘follow-up’ search task such as navigating to a website
Google still accounts for around a 90% share of queries to traditional general search providers and AI assistants combined in the UK. In December 2024 the volume of AI assistant queries was about 0-5% of the volume of Google’s general search queries, albeit that use of AI assistants has been growing quickly with query volume on AI assistants growing by 20-30% in the last three months of 2024. Amongst AI assistants, we estimate that ChatGPT receives by far the greatest volume of queries in the UK, accounting for 80-90% of UK queries to AI assistants in December 2024. In contrast, Google’s Gemini AI assistant only accounted for 0-10% of queries to AI assistants.
Another way users engage with generative AI is when Google (as AI Overviews) and Microsoft (as Bing Generative Search) display AI summaries in response to certain queries on their SERPs. Figure 5.3 shows that Google’s AI Overviews are shown in response to more queries than ChatGPT receives.
Bing is the only English-language provider to have developed search infrastructure which is comparable to Google’s. As shown in the table below, all third parties, both traditional general search providers and AI assistants, which have developed their own search infrastructures have a web-index which is a fraction the size of Google’s and Bing’s and which costs a fraction of the sum spent by Google and Microsoft to maintain."
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Excerpt from Will Cathcart's interview discussing WhatsApp's India business:
"WhatsApp Payments hasn't picked up the way it was envisioned. What went wrong?
We're still really committed to making payments simple, reliable, private, making it work well on WhatsApp. It is growing really quickly in India. It has more than doubled (for businesses) in India in the past year.
How will WhatsApp do personalised ads if private data is encrypted?
One of the challenges is going to be, we have more limited data in WhatsApp. And so, that is one of the trade-offs with the fact that it is a more private service. These ads will be based on more limited data, including about your updates tab usage. We’re going to try and do our best to make the ads relevant."
From WIRED, Everyone Meta hired in their "Superintelligence" team so far:
Not quite investing related, but I really enjoyed this piece.
Face it: you're a crazy person
"We tend to overestimate the prevalence of our preferences, a phenomenon that psychologists call the “false consensus effect”. This is probably because it’s really really hard to take other people’s perspectives, so unless we run directly into disconfirming evidence, we assume that all of our mental settings are, in fact, the defaults. Our idiosyncrasies may never even occur to us.
...once we invented agriculture, almost everyone was a farmer the next 10,000 years. “What should I do with my life?” is really a post-1850 problem, which means, in the big scheme of things, we haven’t had any time to work on it.
The beginning of that work is, I believe, unpacking. As you slice open the boxes and dump out the components of your possible futures, I hope you find the job that’s crazy in the same way that you are crazy."
Current Portfolio:
Please note that these are NOT my recommendation to buy/sell these securities, but just disclosure from my end so that you can assess potential biases that I may have because of my own personal portfolio holdings. Always consider my write-up my personal investing journal and never forget my objectives, risk tolerance, and constraints may have no resemblance to yours.