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Comment by overfeed | Hacker News Reader

The chances of Alphabet losing interest in AI are vanishingly small. Google (pre-Alphabet remaming) was the AI company before AI companies were called that.

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> Google (pre-Alphabet renaming) was the AI company before AI companies were called that.

I disagree. They're an advertising/attention company.

The jury's still out on whether their AI offerings will compliment their existing business or will cannibalize it. And in the case that it cannibalizes the advertising business, will they undermine/kneecap it to protect that cash cow?

It's been a while since they've been the "don't be evil" and "organizing the world's information"-mission Google.

A company can be multiple things. Just like Apple is a Phone, Tablet, & General Computing Company

Agreed, but there's no denying that selling advertising is Google/Alphabet's primary business. And it's not even close.

Its the majority of their revenue, but the share is shrinking

Revenue attributable to advertising:

Q1: 74.1%

Q2: 74.0%

Q3: 72.5%

They didn’t lose interest in messaging when they cycled through half a dozen different apps but the problem was they were building products they wanted to exist rather than what users wanted. I’d worry about AI getting similar churn if PMs make their name by launching a new product rather than improving an existing one.

The root comment was investor-centric, i.e. if you want to divert some investment towards AI, Alphabet is a smart bet.

Investors got great returns as Google churned messaging platforms, and this will likely be the case ad Google churns through AI products, or even entire architectures.

We did get good returns but that was because other units did very well. It’s not a given but still too likely that they’d botch AI products but still be profitable due to ad sales continuing to grow. I do think AI has better than average chances, though, because it seems to have scared their senior management enough to do their jobs: from outside, everything appears to radiate “this can’t fail” in a way they haven’t had since the 2000s.

That makes sense framing it as a skepticism about Google Gemini (a single product) rather than their interest in a category (AI).

I'm less worried about them genuinely losing interest then Google outlasting their AI competition and then kneecapping their AI product to protect their cash cow.

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