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?
Topic
GOOG
A collection of 82 issues
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.
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
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.
The Ecosystem Advantage
Like “Spotify Wrapped”, ChatGPT yesterday let its users see their 2025 stats which was fun to go through. I almost exclusively use ChatGPT Pro model (with extended thinking) which makes it hard for me to casually chat with ChatGPT as it typically takes 10-20 minutes for each of my queries.
Digital Advertising's "Bitter Lesson" Moment
Eric Seufert recently had an interesting podcast with a couple of professors who authored the paper titled “The Impact of Visual Generative AI on Advertising Effectiveness”.
The Reality of Meta's Reality Labs
You have all seen the chart of Meta’s Reality Labs (RL) losses. Just as a reminder, ever since Meta started reporting RL as a separate segment, it has reported a cumulative loss of $73 Billion in the last 20 quarters.
CoStar and Zillow's Google Risk
It seems Google’s masks are off now that the regulatory monkeys are increasingly off its back!
Waymo's Surge
In May 2023, Waymo was doing just 10k commercial public rides per week. Then exactly a year ago, Sundar Pichai disclosed Waymo was doing 175k rides per week.
Reader's feedback on "The Great Abstraction"
A couple of days ago, I wrote a piece titled “The Great Abstraction?”, highlighting the impending tension between OS-layer agent and the entire corpus of companies operating in the app layer. Catapult Capital had some constructive thoughts on that piece which I think is worth highlighting.