Gerstner predicts Google's TPU will not match NVIDIA Rubin's token efficiency despite advantages.
“First, Google is a massive consumer of NVIDIA GPUs, Right? Not only for its own workloads, but also the workloads, you know, in Google Cloud.”
Gerstner argues Google captured 98% of all upside in search despite having 20 competitors with good technology.
“20 competitors in search. They all have pretty good technologies, but Google consumed 98% of all the upside ever associated with search.”
Gerstner says Google's monthly token generation exploded 100x in a year, from 9 trillion to 980 trillion tokens.
“Today, it's 980,000,000,000,000 tokens. So from 9,000,000,000,000 to nine eighty, it's a 100 x increase in a year.”
Gerstner states OpenAI is four times the size Google was at IPO in revenue and searches.
“OpenAI today is four times the size that Google was when it went public in terms of revenue, in terms of searches.”
Gerstner says OpenAI reached 400 billion annual searches eight years faster than Google did.
“I did I saw some analysis from my team this week will post that OpenAI reached, you know, 400,000,000,000 annual searches, eight years faster than Google.”
Gerstner reports organic search traffic down 20-40% as companies push AI-embedded answers above traditional results.
“They're saying organic search is down 20 to 40%. Why? Because they're putting AI on top of it. They got to push it down the page.”
Gerstner argues users are shifting from Google's ten blue links to ChatGPT, Claude, and Apple Intelligence.
“Because people are going to turn to Apple Intelligence instead of 10 blue links to find answers to the questions they have.”
Gerstner states Google processes 10 billion queries daily, more than one per human globally.
“So, you know, a couple queries are more than a query for every human on the planet, and it has the most efficient system in the world for doing that.”
Gerstner calculates AI answers cost 10x more than traditional search: 4 cents versus 0.3 cents per query.
“Now, what does it cost to do that for $7.50 tokens today? And of course, this will go down over time, but it's 10x more, right? It's 4¢ per query.”
Gerstner notes Google barely reduced headcount from 187,000 to 183,000 over the same period.
“You know, if you look at Google over that same period of time, I pulled the numbers this morning.”
Gerstner argues Google 2004 IPO investors captured 90 percent of internet search profits, illustrating patience in venture.
“You could have waited to invest in Google in 2004 and their IPO and you would have captured 90 plus percent of all the profits ever generated in internet search.”
FII Institute
“I think there's plenty of time. If this is going to be as big and as transformational as humanity as we all think it will be, remember, you didn't have to invest in search until Google's IPO in 2004 to capture 95% of all ever generated by Internet search.”
Gerstner characterizes Google as a monopoly that has been a tax collector on the Internet for twenty years.
“Google has been a monopoly, a tax collector on everything on the Internet for twenty years.”
Gerstner argues Google's culture evolved from product-led growth to a research institution.
“the culture at Google had evolved in such a way that it had become more of a research institution than a product led growth institution.”
Gerstner says GPT has become the default verb for AI, not Google's Bard.
“Do you bard or do you chat GPT? GPT has become the default verb for all things AI.”
Gerstner says Google made a mistake letting OpenAI go first despite having the technology and capabilities.
“And to relinquish that spot by letting OpenAI go first, when you had the technology, you had the supercompute, you had the capabilities to release that product, I think was a mistake.”
Gerstner says there's growing confidence that search dollars will redistribute over 5-7 years, even Google must cannibalize search.
“And make no mistake, Google is well positioned to make its claim for that, but its claim is going to come at the expense of search.”
Gerstner warns that companies relying on Google's search ecosystem face potential value destruction from AI disruption.
“You're not gonna have to search through 10 blue links. And so, yes, a lot of the companies that were beneficiaries of the Google ecosystem are now suspect.”
Gerstner invested in Priceline at $1B valuation; it became Google's largest advertiser and built a $100B business.
“We started investing in it when it was a billion dollar business and Priceline became the single largest global advertiser on Google and build a $100,000,000,000 vertical search business by providing better access to hotels and hotel inventory but that business would not have existed without Google.”
Gerstner says Priceline built a $100 billion vertical search business by becoming Google's largest global advertiser.
“We started investing in it when it was a billion dollar business and Priceline became the single largest global advertiser on Google and build a $100,000,000,000 vertical search business by providing better access to hotels”
Gerstner says Priceline built a $100 billion vertical search business by becoming Google's largest global advertiser.
“We started investing in it when it was a billion dollar business and Priceline became the single largest global advertiser on Google and build a $100,000,000,000 vertical search business by providing better access to hotels and hotel inventory”
Gerstner notes Google compounded at similar rates to other platforms despite his early worries about search's future.
“And I was talking of I was worried about the future of search and the future of vertical search starting in 2010, But look at Google's compounded at about the rate the other big platforms have in The US.”
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