Company · 4 episodes
Every Onpode episode on Google.
Episodes
Google's Pixel 11 is getting a price hike—the latest hardware victim of rising costsGoogle VP Shakil Barkat confirmed the Pixel 11 will cost more than the Pixel 10, with the base model rumored at $899—up $100. The driver: RAM costs surged roughly sixfold, from ~$2.80 to ~$12 per gigabyte in one year, according to Morgan Stanley data Barkat cited on record.
Google's AI Overviews are cutting publisher clicks—outlets now threatening to block Google's crawlers entirelyGoogle's AI Overviews have driven catastrophic publisher traffic losses — Business Insider down 85%, USA Today cut in half — while Google controls 88% of referral traffic and offers no opt-out that actually blocks AI Overviews. Publishers including Reddit, Politico, and Reuters are weighing a full Googlebot block, despite that move eliminating their search presence entirely.
The scaling law pattern that governs modern AI model training and why it holdsAI scaling laws show that model loss falls predictably across seven orders of magnitude as compute, data, and parameters grow — but the 2020 Kaplan (OpenAI) and 2022 Chinchilla (DeepMind) papers drew opposite prescriptions from the same law, costing the field billions in misallocated compute on undertrained models.
Why Google's dominance in search created an unbreakable advertising moatGoogle pays roughly $26 billion per year to Apple, Samsung, and Mozilla just to remain the default search engine — despite generating $63.1 billion in search revenue in Q4 alone. That spending reveals a paradox: the most dominant advertising moat ever built still requires a structural subsidy to keep its flywheel turning.