Lenny's Podcast · Rethinking SEO in the age of AI | Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author)
Acquired · Oct 5Google Part III: The AI Company. Google is amazingly well-positioned... will they win in AI?
It went from design to data centers in 15 months after Jeff Dean calculated voice search would need another Google. It trades precision for efficiency, and Google has an estimated 2 to 3 million TPUs. Under Thomas Kurian, who added about 10,000 go to market staff, revenue grew from $4 billion in 2017 to over $50 billion a year, growing 30%. It turned profitable in 2023.
Tips
- Google built the TPU in 15 months when Jeff Dean saw voice search would need another Google▶ 1:45:11Google is estimated to have 2 to 3 million TPUs, against roughly 4 million Nvidia GPUs shipped last year.
- Owning its chips could make Google the lowest cost producer of AI tokens▶ 3:37:40Roughly a 2x markup against a 5x markup, and Google also runs its own infrastructure.
- Thomas Kurian turned Google Cloud into a real enterprise business by building go to market▶ 3:27:24Revenue went from $4 billion in 2017 to $13 billion in 2020 and $26 billion in 2022. It turned profitable in 2023 and now runs over $50 billion a year, growing 30%.
- Google is the only company holding the model, the chip, the cloud and the application▶ 3:30:50Google is the only model maker with self-sustaining funding from its search profits, about $140 billion over the last 12 months.
