Comment by abakker
12 hours ago
you are right. I guess what I was thinking was that google's bigness was essentially a bad capital allocation strategy, since they were lazy and not motivated by absolute return, but some combination of acceptable risk, politics, personal preferences, etc in a large management team that has seemed...disconnected for quite some time.
They have a structural advantage in cash flow and stability of funding, but stability is also a handicap when disruption is the objective.
It's a notoriously double edged sword. When you create huge absolute return incentives, you get things like the Airtable acquisition, where everyone's sad that you built a $1.2B company because some investor at some point mistakenly thought it was an $11B company.
Yeah, that makes sense. I suppose the flip side of all of this is that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic have made a lot of money relative to their spending. Google is probably just trying to be more prudent. But, AI so far is a money spending contest, more than a money making one.