Opinion
Ramaswamy: Amazon Search Is a Joke Polluted by Misleading Ads
“I find Amazon search experience a joke because it is so full of ads and it's actually misleading ads where it's really hard to find what is going on.”
Opinion
Ramaswamy: Big Tech Claims That Ads Democratize Access Are Entirely Self-Serving
“I find this whole thing of ads enable Google to make free products or ads enable Facebook to be available for Ecuadorian people made by billionaires sitting in Palo Alto to be entirely self-serving.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ramaswamy: Slootman Stepped Down Because Snowflake Was Slow on AI
“I think what happened was the company was a little slow to reacting to changes from things like machine learning and AI. And that was a little bit of, honestly, the reason why Frank voluntarily pushed for the change, because he felt presently that we are heade…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ramaswamy: Line Between Agentic Systems and Pure Software Will Be Bloody
“But on the other hand, I think the line between what an agentic system like this is going to be and what like pure software is going to be will be absolutely is going to be bloody.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ramaswamy: Why Google Failed in Shopping and Travel
“Google, for example, stopped that information. God knows I spent enough time trying to get into physical things like shopping or airline purchases or hotels. We didn't really succeed because we didn't have core competence really in some fundamental way beyond …”
Opinion
Ramaswamy: A Multi-Cloud Data Platform Can Become as Large as a CSP
“A data platform that especially spans CSPs has the right, you have to earn it, has the right to be as large as a CSP itself.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ramaswamy: Advertising Will Reinvent Itself in the Conversational AI Era
“It will reinvent itself in the chat world.”
Assertion Supported
Ramaswamy: Google's PageRank Ran Out of Juice by 2004
“The insight that powered Google was PageRank. It was a way of harnessing the power of the entire internet to figure out what was popular and what was not. But PageRank ran out of juice. Like in six years, like 2004 or five. And while Google never really liked …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ramaswamy: Model Size and Serving Costs Will Drop for Search
“For a lot of like known problems model size is not really going to be an issue and there's going to be an ongoing reduction both in the size and therefore the cost to serve them.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ramaswamy: Flash Let Neeva Solve Index Replacement Faster Than Google
“Asim, for example was just brilliant at engineering a system that ran completely on Flash in which we could do things like super rapid iteration, replace the entire index or the space of two days or put in arbitrary amounts of information for experimentation i…”
Insight
Ramaswamy: LLMs Can Replace Massive Click Data for Core Search Tasks
“We realized that a lot of problems that Google solved with massive scale and user data, they could, in fact, solve with LLMs. So we use a lot of them for things like query rewriting.”
Insight
Ramaswamy: Ad-Supported Platforms Carry Self-Destructive Incentives to Increase Density
“Ads sort of come you know, with elements of self-destruction built in. It's part for the course when you're doing it, it's always attractive to do things like show more ads.”
Insight
Ramaswamy: Monetizing Answer-Focused AI Interfaces with Ads Is Much Harder
“If you're in the business of providing answers like ChatGPT was ads just becomes a whole lot harder to do. They're really, you're just you know, you're betting on the quality of answers”
Prediction Held up
Ramaswamy Predicts Major Platforms Will Allow Indexing but Block LLM Scrapers
“I think what is going to happen is that some of the larger content creators, you know, I would put people like Reddit and Quora. These are some of the forward thinking ones very much in that bucket. They're going to say, we want to be part of search, but we do…”
Disclosure
Ramaswamy: Snowflake Abandoned Foundation Models Due to Capital Constraints
“Early last year, we actually went down the path of creating foundation models. We created a credible MOE model. This was early last year, but we also quickly realized that our ability to compete with the likes of OpenAI or Anthropic was going to be really hard…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ramaswamy: OpenAI and Anthropic are laser-focused on building top coding agents
“Coding agents are particularly interesting from this perspective because it is very clear that both Anthropic and OpenAI are going to be laser set on having the best one best one that there is.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ramaswamy: Databricks and Fabric Strained Snowflake's Relationship With Microsoft
“Among the earliest places where this went to work was in our relationship with Microsoft, which was okay, but not that great because they had a one P relationship with Databricks. And they're always kind of conflicted about is fabric the answer or snowflake th…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ramaswamy: Google Featured Snippets Never Passed 7 Percent Coverage
“Things like featured snippets were never deployable at scale. The technology simply was not there. Even if Google put the full might of its mighty machine against the problem, the coverage never really extended beyond like five, six, seven percent, and it woul…”
Opinion
Ramaswamy: Usefulness Strongly Limits Answerable Questions in AI Search
“At this point, I don't feel that there's like a natural limit to how much LLMs can be used with search. I do feel, however, that there's a very strong limit to how many questions can be usefully answered.”
Assertion Supported
Ramaswamy: Search RPM Is Roughly $50 in US, $20 Globally
“The average RPM for US queries is about
40 to 50 dollars, and clearly that will be a very high cost.
the rest of the world is a lot lower, by the way, like my memory is on the order of 20 dollars if you average over the whole world.”
Assertion Partly supported
Ramaswamy: Google Gave Over 100 Percent Rev Share to Early Partners
“Google gave more than a hundred percent to AOL and close to a hundred percent to Yahoo in its early years.”
Disclosure
Ramaswamy: Hypergrowth created 7 to 10 organizational layers at Snowflake
“Snowflake had basically specialized at every layer possible, and there was a very long distance between the engineer that did a feature and the customer that made use of the feature, and there were like seven to 10 layers of teams that were involved.”
Insight
Ramaswamy: 2D Dashboards Fail to Answer Complex Enterprise Questions
“A dashboard is a two D view of a complex surface. It just has no easy answers to the many questions that any reasonable person you or I is going to have off of that.”
Insight
Ramaswamy: Enterprise AI requires rigorous evals like software engineering
“We need to think of AI the same way we think about software engineering, which is there's a right and there's a wrong. It cannot be this mode of like, YOLO, AI, you can get some good answers, some terrible answers, it's your problem. And so we very much emphas…”
Sridhar Ramaswamy