Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…This is why we saved Cloud for this episode. There are two aspects of Google Cloud that I don’t think they foresaw back when they started the business with App Engine, but are hugely strategically important to Google today. One is just simply that cloud is the distribution mechanism for AI. If you want to play an AI today, you either need to have a great application, a great model, a great ship, or a great cloud. Google is trying to have all four of those. There is no other company that has (I think) more than one. I think that’s the right call. Think about the big AI players. NVIDIA has a cloud, but not really. They just have chips. Made the best chips and the chips everyone wants, but chips. Then you just look around the rest of the big tech companies. Meta right now, only an application. They’re completely out of the race for the frontier models at the moment. We’ll see what they’re hiring spree yields. You look at Amazon. Infrastructure, they have application. Maybe. I don’t actually know if amazon.com. I’m sure it benefits from LLMs in a bunch of ways. Mainly, it’s cloud.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.