Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

I believe Google has earned the most revenue of any business ever [1]

So if the idea is to unseat Google, and make LLMs that are monetized by ads -- well that would be a lot of revenue!

The problem is obviously that Google knows this, and they made huge investments in AI before anyone else

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I guess someone wants to do to Google what Apple did to Microsoft in the mobile era -- take over the operating system that matters by building something new (mobile), not by directly trying to unseat Microsoft

The problem seems to be that no one has figured out what the network effect in LLMs is. Google has a few network effects, but the bidder / ad buyer network is very strong -- they can afford to pay out a bigger rev share than anybody else

Google also had very few competitors early on -- Yahoo was the most credible competitor for a long time. And employees didn't leave to start competitors. Whereas OpenAI has splintered into 5 or more companies, fairly early in its life

[1] at least according to the Acquired podcast, which is reputable

edit: oops, it was profit, not revenue

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/google

Google with this business model makes more profits than any other company, ergo tautologically, is the most magical business model ever discovered.

> I believe Google has earned the most revenue of any business ever [1]

By yearly revenue, the highest revenue company is Walmart, followed by Amazon, which make somewhere near twice the revenue of Alphabet (around 11th place, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...). Especially if you account the inflation, the total lifetime revenues of the major oil companies will easily dwarf Google.

Google is nowhere close to earning the most revenue of any business ever.

There's difference between running on a margin of 5% and 90% at those scale

> There's difference between running on a margin of 5% and 90% at those scale

OP said revenue, not profit. And neither of those numbers are relevant to Google, which runs a 32% (28%) operating (net) margin [1].

That said, yes, Google is the most profitable company in the world [2]. But its $116bn is not in a different league from Microsoft's $102bn, Apple's $99bn or Saudi Aramco's $96bn.

[1] https://s206.q4cdn.com/479360582/files/doc_financials/2025/q...

[2] https://www.financecharts.com/screener/most-profitable

...I kind of don't understand why revenue is ever a useful metric. I imagine I could make a lot of revenue selling hundred dollar bills for $10.

The value of revenue as a metric is that you can't really play financial games to screw with revenue, while there's lots of stuff you can do to inflate or deflate your profit. See, e.g., Hollywood accounting.

Neither revenue nor profit is the full story, though.

> you can't really play financial games to screw with revenue

Accrual accounting gives lots of room for revenue-recognition fuckery [1].

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/revenuerecognition.asp

The claim was "most revenue."

Of course, even you go by most profit, Saudi Aramco still has Google beat, because it turns out that being able to charge highest market price for oil that costs you $5/barrel to make and being around for decades gives you an astounding lifetime net profit.

The problem seems more to be that every last one of these companies are burning through cash at an astonishing rate. No one, least of all Google, is making a profit from AI. They keep dangling AGI in front of investors even though no one can really define what it is.

Companies like Uber and Amazon operated at a loss, true. But they had an actual product. And they didn't come close to the money Google, Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft are losing.

> I believe Google has earned the most revenue of any business ever

As people pointed, this is wrong.

But anyway, Google's revenue last year was enough to satisfy the smallest point of the interval the article points out. And barely so.

So if everything goes perfectly for the next 5 years capital-wise, and AI manages to capture Google's revenue, at the most optimist conditions, they will be able to break even with depreciation.

Honestly, that is better than what I was expecting. But it completely different from the picture you will see in any media.

> I believe Google has earned the most revenue of any business ever

Google is very large, and I’m sure Acquired framed the statement is such a way that it’s true, but this statement as you presented it is false.

Other publicly traded companies have reported more lifetime revenue. Other product categories besides internet search have generated more revenue.

>The problem seems to be that no one has figured out what the network effect in LLMs is.

At the very least, the exact same network effects with respect to advertising that search has. The vast majority of frequent ChatGPT users I know mostly use it like a search engine.

That said, those network effects will be massive. Ads in LLMs are going to be unprecedentedly lucrative, irrespective of the platform. Google/Meta currently charge so much for ads because they have such enormous proprietary profiles on users based on their search/communication history that they can offer advertisers the ability to target users with extraordinary granularity. But at the end of the day, the ad itself is static and obviously an ad. LLMs will make these ads dynamic and insidious, subtly injected into chats in the way a real-life conversation might happen to discuss products. LLMs will become the ultimate word-of-mouth advertisers, the final form of astroturfing.

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