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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

OK but vertical integration and low costs is only half of the problem. You also have to make a product that people want, otherwise the whole enterprise is meaningless. SpaceX is selling launches every week. What is Google selling that uses all those TPUs, and to whom?

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Gemini 2 was entirely trained on Trillium, Googles 6th generation TPU. About 100,000 of them. And all inference is run on TPUs.

https://venturebeat.com/ai/google-new-trillium-ai-chip-deliv...

Right. But are people paying for Gemini? Does all that vertical integration make it cheaper than its competitors? (Which is what works for SpaceX)

Gemini Flash is my go-to for many client projects, so there's at least a few people paying for it. If it fits your use case, it's easily the best value for money, and often makes something commercially viable that wouldn't otherwise be.

Sample size of 1, obviously, so YMMV.

I also pay for Claude Pro for personal coding use, so I'm aware that Flash isn't exactly a drop-in replacement for a more powerful model. From my limited testing, though, Pro 2.0 is almost indistinguishable from 3.5 Sonnet.

Even if the LLM hype dies, and nobody at all wants to rent TPUs from GCP, then Google can use the TPUs to train and run large advertising models and improve the quality of their search.

They themselves are a big enough customer to make this worth it. Any business from GCP is just icing on the cake. Keep in mind that TPUs can train non-LLM models too.

All the ad tech in the world won’t matter if people have stopped using the medium those ads are displayed on top of by then. I think the way people use the web is about to change drastically.

Very much this. I think the reason Google products are more and more infested with ads is to keep up revenue against people moving to better alternatives.

TPUs are used internally for products and research and also sold as a service thru Google Cloud. The list of TPU customers is pretty long. But Google could the product entirely internal and still reap plenty of benefit.

Many of those launches are sold to itself (starlink), just like google uses a lot of its TPU capacity for its own purposes.

Google has been charging people actual money to access features running on TPUs for years. I helped launch TPU inference features for Gmail in 2015. There may have been earlier systems running on TPU that I wasn't aware of.

Just killing the competition is enough with their integrated products?, like google search with ai features,(perplexity.ai) Ai on android now gemini replacing google voice (chat gpt and others).

Targeted ads use a lot of behavioral models. Google sells ads.

Has this improved their ad targeting? In a way that shows up in the bottom line, or even the top line?

Yes

Behavioral advertising.

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