https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/r...
Businesses running their own hardware probably prefer CUDA as well for being more generally useful.
They're in limited supply. Even Google doesn't have enough for their own use.
Those enterprises won’t take the risk of being sued for using a model without proper permission.
https://bughunters.google.com/blog/5424842357473280/zen-and-...
The general understanding of how it works is surprisingly easy though, you can find the paper here https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.06440
Compensation could be of the form "we get a cheaper rate from Google" or even "this is the only form in which the service is offered" or perhaps "we aren't big enough to qualify for the fully airgapped offering".
That means they have direct fiber connections to the Tier 1/Tier 2 guys. The big ones have direct fiber connections to the NYSE.
If they're not rolling their own connection, they're using BT Radianz, IPC Systems, Colt Technology Services, etc.
This feels like a play for companies in highly regulated industries, GCP has a notable list of biopharma customers.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/public-sector/google-pu...
> Our GDC air-gapped product, which is now authorized for US Government Secret and Top Secret missions, and on which Gemini is available, provides the highest levels of security and compliance.
You don't have to be a government agency to not want your company's data all over the place.
At first glance, it seems Google Cloud might lose some revenue from customers who can now deploy Gemini in-house. On the other hand, it's not a complete loss, since presumably Google Cloud is still involved in providing some underlying tech? Not to mention, some customers would never consider using off-premises setup anyway.
Would Google seriously have trouble raising the funds to build a chip fab? This seems like something they could do if they actually want to but I’d guess that would take actual leadership when they appear to have none.
Especially in today’s political climate, building this in a purple state would ensure longevity too. The Trump admin would probably let them break ground immediately if they had the plans and I doubt democratic leadership would disagree either.
So what gives?
If I was an investor and Google said they are going to now compete with Nvidia and TSMC I would take that as a sign they the leadership has completely lost the ability to see what their core competency is. Investing 100-200+ billion into fabs just to be on an equal playing field, is not it.
Would be a poor allocation of capital. Especially since, as they build up capacity for their own jobs, they get to see the excess to customers.
Performance may differ but Google (and Nvidia) are very interested in having good performance on both platforms.
For training the model the HW is much more important as you need to scale up to as many chips as possible without being bottlenecked by the network.
This would just be inference, and it doesn't need to be very efficient as its for on prem usage not selling API access. So you could strip out any efficiency secrets, and it would probably look like a bigger Gemma (their open source model).
I wonder if they would/could try and strip out stuff like whatever tricks they use for long context + video support (both of which they are a bit ahead of everyone else on).
Probably the most praise I’ve ever seen about Elastic.
I do respect the amount of power and utility, and it’s definitely a workhorse, but it’s like a horse with one human leg, a bad eye, extra bones but also not enough bones, and a French accent but only knows Korean. Once you get used to the fact that you can’t do what you intend to, but you can do what elastic wants, it becomes a lot more manageable.
What was so bad about the search appliance though? Physical? Software?
How would you say it compares to those?
Maybe there are some exceptions. Disney World? MGM Resorts in Las Vegas?
What made it one of the worst products you’ve ever used?
It was the very start of the AI hype cycle, and in fact they built the app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14636228
I think by the end I was far more invested in the characters rather than the plot though.
That the world does not have a Stanley Tucci, Stephen Tobolowsky buddy comedy trilogy has made it all the poorer. But it’s been a while since someone tried to remake The Odd Couple…
I mean, would you buy cookies from a brand that is known for producing rodenticides?
I mean, the company that makes Raid also makes Saran Wrap and Ziploc bags. Corporate conglomerates can do lots of things.
The entire Google Cloud org is funded by regular customers paying money, not advertising.
That can’t be true, how did they bootstrap it? How do they pay for R & D for their half baked offerings?
Advertisers paid money for Google for totally unrelated services. Google invested that money in a number of ways. One of them was to build this very profitable non-advertising business. The advertisers didn't fund that business any more than the advertisers funded US treasuries, or the dozens of startups that Google has invested in as a VC.
This is a thread about using your money for better things than paying an ad company. The comment that started this argument you want to have pointed out that it’s self sustaining. But I pointed out that wasn’t always true. Tfsh backed my claim.
So today maybe there isn’t a problem to which your money isn’t being spent with the ad org but it was that way for a very long time to which we can grant the OP some grace as it’s a rather recent change.
There is even still an argument to be made that while you may not be giving money to the ad org you are still giving money to Google thereby helping them deflect the damage they cause the world in their other orgs.
The ads were providing income to Google which allowed Google to bootstrap Cloud until it was profitable on its own, not vice-versa.
When you buy (or bought) Cloud services, that doesn't affect Google's ad revenue or advertising behavior at all, not for the better and not for the worse. They're basically unrelated orgs within the corporation. Using Cloud isn't promoting ads or whatever you seem to think, not now and not previously.
You could have saved us all a lot of time by simply stating upfront that you hate Google as a whole, rather than discussing the technicalities of which parts have to do with advertising or not.
In a sense, yes, it was bootstrapped by ads and now pays for itself.
As context, you need to remember that Google deleted their "Don't Be Evil" motto and became a defense contractor. The customer will most likely receive a black box owned and set up by Google. That means they have no way of knowing if the system inside is phoning home or being remote controlled by an US government agency, or not. You can then say that the model is hosted in your own data center, which might make some people feel good, but using it with personal information is still a violation of the GDPR.
If Google, however, would make these boxes fully offline capable and I was also allowed to wipe all hard disks myself before returning it, that would convince me of their good intentions.
As others have stated, being able to see that the appliance is phoning home or not is trivial. No one who is in the market for this won't ensure it meets some rigurous bar.
It was totally unrelated to PRISM, which was more like a voluntary law enforcement access portal that autoapproved every request. The participating companies since made public statements saying they no longer operate the portal, thereby forcing intelligence agencies to use National Security Letters instead. That's certainly closer to the intent of the laws passed by Congress.
The NSA does not need consent from Google. Google is simply ordered to comply. See https://policies.google.com/terms/information-requests?hl=en...
> FISA orders and authorizations can be used to compel electronic surveillance and the disclosure of stored data, including content from services like Gmail, Drive, and Photos.
If you look at the content requests under FISA, you can see that there were over 118000 requests for user data between July 2023 and December 2023. https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/us-national-...
Also, companies have been sharing data with cloud security organisations for years now. There a robust means of assessing the risk. License agreements are a very real thing.
Are you implying that Google will sell a product that is designed to ‘sabotage’ their own customer’s business? The legal and reputational damage far outweigh the value of stolen information.
Or do you mean that it could be a vector of attack? That can happen with literally any piece of software, hardware, or appliance you install in or out of your datacentre.
The US government is constantly telling us that the likes of Huawei and Hikvision are doing precisely that, despite being subject to the same risks of reputational damage.
Of course, the same could be said of everything else in the data centre. It's not like Google are somehow more vulnerable than Juniper or Cisco or Unifi or Dell or Intel or whoever.
That and there are various regulatory, political etc. reasons. Also I'm not sure about the "anymore" IMHO a lot more companies trust cloud providers with their data than they did 10-20 years ago .
Sure you could hide some way of phoning home and deploy it into the SCIF, but would you really want to risk a firing squad to improve some advertising metrics?