there are no moats; build the infra

last week was apparently dominated by gossiping about the departures from google. SemiAnalysis and plenty of others spilled a lot of metaphorical ink in the topic. the SA take, Gemini is Cooked but GCP is Cooking reeks of gossip and twitter tea leaf reading with their usual ass load of charts and wordy analysis. sometimes, this is a lot of fun. sometimes, it’s just tedious AF. this was tedious AF and really just felt like feed filler.

there’s a reasonable take here that google doesn’t see the need to pour money down the frontier training hole and by diversifying their bets with investments into the various AI model shops they’re reaping the best of both worlds. google’s always had the best tech stack. they saw into the TPU future well before the industry did broadly. it’s entirely possible and i would suspect quite likely that they’ve simply opted to focus on owning the infra layer and providing solid work-a-day models a la flash that are reasonably useful and competitive but don’t require the massive training costs up front.

there’s a whole finance angle to this discussion which is uh, interesting. who knows how these SPVs hold out but that’s apparently a fear for another day. there’s also a significant concentration of risk. the customer base can reliably be counted on a single hand with fingers left over.