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GOOG

A collection of 68 issues

OpenAI's Dilemma

WSJ yesterday had an interesting reporting on why OpenAI is pondering to focus more on enterprise. Some excerpts from the piece: “OpenAI’s top executives are finalizing plans for a major strategy shift to refocus the company around coding and business users, recognizing that a “do everything all at once”

Nvidia's Burgeoning Moats, Pichai's Comp

Jensen Huang mentioned at Morgan Stanley (MS) TMT Conference last week that Nvidia just reported “the single best print in the history of humanity”. While such glib comments attracted a lot of attention, I thought Huang’s session was quite instructive in explaining to investors how Huang is busy at

Hardcoding Habits

In early 2025, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that he estimates EU fined the US tech companies more than $30 Billion over the last decade or so. He went onto lament that instead of US government defending their tech companies from this indirect form of “tariff”, US government itself often led such

Alphabet: From Search to AI to "AGI"

Google is perhaps one of the most recognized brand in the world. I wouldn’t, however, confuse familiarity with understanding of Alphabet’s business. By the end of this piece, it will likely be clear how complex this business has become over time. It is perhaps not a stretch to

The Long-term Reality of Hyperscalers: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Scenarios

In my “Lipstick on Frontier AI Pigs” piece, I wrote the following: Apart from ignoring the cost of training, another deeply questionable assumption Amodei makes in his argument is the gross margin for inference. In his “stylized” example, he assumes gross margin to be 67% which is directly responsible for

Alphabet 4Q'25 Update

Alphabet came to this earnings with elevated expectations from investors. It delivered. The stock is down a bit post-earnings despite that, but it’s hard to imagine Alphabet shareholders not having a good sleep last night. Here are my highlights from the earnings. Revenue Who amongst us really thought search

The Bull Case for AI Content on UGC Platforms

Yesterday, Ben Thompson interviewed Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters. I don’t cover Netflix, but this particular bit on “AI Slop” caught my attention: Ben Thompson: Is AI slop going to save you? If it overwhelms the UGC platforms and basically it’s like you’re a refuge, so this is

The Misunderstood Utility of Search Ads

I have been increasingly noticing an overwhelming negative perception on search ads. Ben Thompson often mentions how search ads can feel like skimming the advertisers as Google collects rent on economic activity that would likely happen anyway. Notice this piece from 2022: “…oftentimes search ads feel like a rake on

The Ecosystem Advantage: Part 2

While explaining Alphabet’s “ecosystem advantage”, I mentioned “the real advantage of Google is its ability to monetize Gemini through ads even though they are not putting ads on the core Gemini chat bots itself.” To say it differently, I consider it exceptionally likely that Google will insert ads in

Alphabet's Alpha Bet

A couple of months ago, Demis Hassabis indicated what he is more focused on these days: World models are the thing I’m mostly spending my research time on. You probably saw SIMA 2 come out just a couple of days ago. I sometimes call it SIMA playing in the