Opinion
Kurian: Competitors attack Google because their own AI models are terrible
“If you don't have your own model, or you have a model of your own, but it's terrible, naturally you're going to say something like that.”
Opinion
Kurian questions Microsoft's AI contributions beyond supplying OpenAI with GPUs
“Whether that's how much of credit goes to Microsoft outside of providing them a bunch of GPUs, time will tell.”
Insight
Kurian: Long-term AI economics depend primarily on inference cost, not training
“First and foremost, in the long run, if AI really scales, the cost you really want to care about is inference cost, because that's what's integrated into serving, and any company that wants to recover the cost of training has to have a large scale inference fo…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Kurian: AI model pre-training will continue to see diminishing returns
“There are gains to be had. I don't think they will be at the same ratio as earlier because just, you know, there's always a lot of diminishing returns at some point. I don't think we are at the point where there are no more gains, but I think we won't see the …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Google Cloud sales reps receive no extra pay for selling DeepMind models
“Our field is not compensated any differently. Our partner ecosystem is able to use all the models in the platform, and most importantly, we have very large Anthropic customers running on GCP.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kurian: Google Search, Cloud, and YouTube share the same inference stack
“And one benefit we have at Google is all our services, whether that's search or us or YouTube, this inferencing of the same stack and same model series. So the model learns very quickly from all that reinforcement learning feedback and gets better and better.”
Assertion Supported
Kurian: Google Cloud reduced AI inference costs 20x in 2024
“Like if you look at just 2024, we've reduced the cost of inferencing, and you can see it in our prices of the models by a factor of 20 times.”
Insight
Kurian: Separate AI add-on subscriptions prevent daily habit formation for employees
“It requires people to change the way they work, and we want to drive daily usage of AI, and because it change, needs to change the way they work, you want them to get used to using it. If, hey, this group of users in a company gets it, that group of users is n…”
Assertion Contradicted
Kurian: No enterprise software company grew faster than Google Cloud since 2019
“And to grow from the scale we were in 2019 to where we are now, No other enterprise software company has grown that fast, and that's a credit to our sales organization.”
Prediction Held up
Kurian: Cloud adoption will definitely surpass 50% of IT workloads
“We definitely see it getting north of 50%.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kurian: OpenAI is the only major model Google Cloud does not offer
“The only model we don't offer today is OpenAI, and that's not because we don't want to offer their model.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kurian: AgentSpace is Google Cloud's fastest-growing product ever
“Yes.
We're very proud of it, yes.”
Disclosure
Kurian: Google bundled Gemini into Workspace instead of selling separate subscriptions
“We made Gemini part of Google Workspace. Rather than requiring somebody to buy a separate subscription.”
Assertion Partly supported
Kurian: Google's AI Assistant for Verizon Call Centers Achieves 96% Accuracy
“We've helped them build something called a personal research assistant, so that if I am a call center person, and you call me saying, here is my set of issues, and we can, how long does it take to research that information and put it back in front of you, so t…”
Disclosure
Kurian: Google Cloud avoided building professional services to attract partners
“We made a decision early on. We're not going to have a big professional services organization specifically so that we can attract the partner community.”
Assertion Open · timeframe Apr 2028
Ford uses Google Cloud TPUs for digital wind tunnel simulations
“Ford Motor Company, for example, when they brought their, ah, they wanted to use our chips and our system called TPU, Tensor Processing Unit, to model air flow and wind tunnel simulation using Computers rather than physical wind tunnels, so they're doing that …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Over two million developers build daily on Google Cloud's AI platform
“We have over two million developers building every day, every morning, every night using our AI platform”
Assertion Supported
Kurian: Google Cloud offers 200 models on its platform
“We offer 200 models in our platform.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kurian: Google Cloud releases DeepMind models to developers within hours
“In fact, we're staging models out to the developer ecosystem within a matter of a few hours after they're finally built.”
Assertion Partly supported
AES cut end-of-quarter audits from 14 days to one hour using AI
“A company called AES. It's a energy utility. It's an energy company. It builds you know, and delivers energy different parts of the world. It used to take them 14 days to run their end of quarter audit. They do it in one hour now.”
Assertion Supported
Kurian: Google built an open agent-to-agent protocol and dev kit
“So what we've done at Google is build an agent development kit, which has an API through which you can, one, create agents. We provide you a tool set to do it. We provide you a set of tools that these agents can use, but we also have an open agent to agent pro…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kurian: Google Cloud grew from 1,000 partners in 2019 to 100,000 today
“In 2019, we had about a thousand partners. Today we have a 100,000.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Kurian: Every Walmart transaction is processed in Google Cloud
“You know, every transaction that happens at a Walmart gets into our cloud to allow them to do analysis of how much inventory do they need to replace, which customers are buying, what products are selling.”
Disclosure
Kurian: Google Cloud is deploying infrastructure into McDonald's restaurants
“If you look at the work we're doing with McDonald's, we're putting our cloud into the restaurants.”
Thomas Kurian