Very curious how we'll look back on Google spending 2 billion dollars to "license IP" and hire a handful of people.
If there's 47m software engineers in the world, at $200/month, and 50% gross profit that's a $56 billion TAM. Not crazy to think it's more if we include the adjacent space of analyst roles that write software (sql, advanced excel, etc).
They'll have to crush it to make a $2 billion acquihire look reasonable, but it's possible.
that's not the market they're thinking of, they're thinking of the total amount of money spent on developers per year, globally, and capturing a percentage of that
They are doing what they've always done skirting the edges of antitrust laws by buying up competitors before they become competitors so that they can shut them down.
Will require a lot of barriers to entry to charge %. Not disagreeing with your statement of their thinking, but will be v surprised if that pans out.
It’s more about not getting embarrassed ever again. The breakthrough papers for LLMs came from Google, but not the product. This was embarrassing. Even if you have to spend double on everything from now on you do it, because Google effectively got sucker punched by ChatGPT.
It’s sad that the organizational failures that led to that embarrassment will definitely not change. Too much eagerness for subjugation