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This seems pretty incredible but Im mostly surprised Google is dipping their toes into this domain at all. Feels fairly outside the Google wheelhouse. I could understand Alphabet having another company provide this kind of functionality but it just seems out of place.

Who are they competing with?

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They have a strong OR team who has been building an excellent open source solver (OR-tools) for more than a decade. It makes sense to start trying to commercialise this work. It's interesting seeing them do it through problem specific APIs though.

https://developers.google.com/optimization

https://github.com/google/or-tools

I wouldn't think of this as a full-fledged business yet, but as a way for the Operations Research team to get their work tried out in the real world.

If they're really improving the state-of-the-art, to the degree that real money is saved, and the industries are big enough, these APIs will probably get used a lot and moved out of research or licensed.

It also makes sense to continue diversifying away from ads and generative AI.

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