Will Google Become Our AI-Powered Central Planner?
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Gosplan
13 min read
The article explicitly compares Google's potential role to Soviet-style central planning. Understanding Gosplan, the Soviet state planning committee that coordinated the entire USSR economy, provides essential historical context for evaluating whether this analogy is apt or hyperbolic.
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Price fixing
2 min read
The article raises concerns about Google coordinating pricing across competing retailers like Nike and Reebok, which 'looks much more like an automated form of price-fixing.' Understanding the legal definition, history, and enforcement of price-fixing laws is crucial to evaluating these concerns.
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Pharmacy benefit management
13 min read
The article uses PBMs as a key analogy for how Google's 'discount' pricing could actually mean higher overall prices, comparing fake discounts in healthcare to Google's model. Understanding PBM controversies illuminates the pricing opacity concerns raised.
Earlier this week, Google made three important announcements. The first is that its AI product Gemini will be able to read your Gmail and access all the data that Google has about you on YouTube, Google Photos, and Search. While Google skeptics might see a Black Mirror style dystopia, the goal is to create a chatbot that knows you intimately. And the value of that is real and quite significant.
Here’s venture capitalist and former Googler David Lieb on how he uses this new automated assistant.
Google presented a number of different use cases. For instance, a user could “Ask Gemini to ‘Recommend tires for my car.’” and it can pull from your photos to “understand your car’s make and model, and even the types of trips you take” and thus make better suggestions. You might ask it to recommend travel destinations or books, or even haircuts. And Google will offer recommendations, along with products and pricing information.
The second announcement is that Google has cut a deal with Apple to power that company’s Siri and foundational models with Gemini, extending its generative AI into the most important mobile ecosystem in the world.
The quality of AI is in part a result of data, so the ability of Google to use Apple user data is significant. Already Google, with its existing search, email, maps, online video, docs, auto software, and other products it can use to distribute and capture data, has advantages that make it almost untouchable. Its Gemini product is rapidly gaining market share in the generative AI market, similar to the trajectory of its search product in 2002. It’s increasingly an article of faith on Wall Street that Google has won the AI battle, and this Apple deal makes it unlikely anyone else can catch up.
And the third announcement is that Google will launch a new Gemini-powered ad service and open protocol to create personalized surveillance pricing for merchants across the economy. It is, as Google VP Vidhya Srinivasan said, a way to “offer custom deals to specific shoppers who are ready to buy, without having to extend the same thing to everybody.” Partners include Walmart, Visa, Mastercard, Shopify, Gap, Kroger, Macy’s, Stripe, Home Depot, Lowes, American Express, etc.