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Comment by Liquix | Hacker News Reader

the FAANG giants have been government assets for ~15+ years [0]. they don't have to turn a profit every quarter, innovate, or make their search any better because they no longer play by the rules a normal business does. they are a critical "too big to fail" component of the state's global surveillance system.

[0] https://static1.makeuseofimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/upl...

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Linking the slide deck that caused Google to start encrypting the traffic between their own data centers running on their own fiber is perhaps not the most compelling argument that Google is a state asset.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/tech-companies-s...

You think it is so hard for the NSA to have a tap within Google's datacenters?

You think Google could say no to NSA if they were asking nicely to put a tap?

Encryption between datacenters is to keep away other state actors, not the US.

> You think it is so hard for the NSA to have a tap within Google's datacenters?

Yes

> You think Google could say no to NSA if they were asking nicely to put a tap?

Yes

> they don't have to turn a profit every quarter,

And, yet, aside from Aramco, they are the most profitable companies in the history of the world.

> they don't have to turn a profit every quarter,

What does this mean? Like, I work there and I’d be pretty annoyed if they stopped turning a profit as a collapse of the stock price would affect my compensation.

It’s interesting to hear this take because I’m used to hearing the opposite: that Google is too focused on increasing short-term profit at the expense of product quality.

OpenAI is Microsoft. Microsoft is a FAANG giant.

Microsoft is their leading investor. They don't technically own OpenAI.

And technically Musk was not the wealthiest man in the world when he bought Twitter, because he didn't had that much cash laying around in his bank accounts. And yet, when wanted, or more precisely put in corner to do so, he did shit 50 billions and bought it.

OpenAI is Microsoft, technical details don't matter here, only money.

Cash isn't technically all wealth

Microsoft is literally not in "FAANG". But they are in MANGA.

Before FAANG the acronym was MAFANG, but due to too much closeness to a slang word, the political correct crowd change it to FAANG. Also, just as a side note, Microsoft is a trillion worth more than the "G" in FAANG.

FAANG or MAFANG or MANGA are still silly because they include Netflix which is completely unlike and smaller than the other giants.

The FAANG acronym was actually about growth rather than size, and their stock was performing like a tech stock for a while. But yes, they don't belong because they're actually a media "manufacturing" business, although a successful one.

How is that relevant? Microsoft bought OpenAI, didn't create it by R&D, so the assertion stands: giants don't do new things, for whatever reason.

The amount of fundamental breakthroughs at places like IBM, Bell, Xerox, all beg to differ with you.

In some fields of CS, places like MS research garner nearly 50% of all top conference publications.

Not just surveillance. Power projection. I wonder what impacts you can have on foreign economies by playing with quality of these tech giants outputs?

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