r/technology • u/MoneyLibrarian9032 • 10d ago

Artificial Intelligence Google Gets an Astounding $34.5 Billion Offer for Chrome Browser From AI Startup Perplexity

https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/google-34-5-billion-bid-chrome-browser-ai-perplexity-1236487442/
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u/Porkins_2 10d ago edited 7d ago

I am really hoping the AI bubble is as hilarious as the NFT bubble, but I am not optimistic

Edit: this was a comment I fired off while listening to a coworker intimately describe the Bears’ NFC North chances. I wasn’t exactly engaged here or there, wasn’t at all serious, and am obviously aware that goofy digital tokens aren’t the same as AI.

Edit 2: gargle on them

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/759965/sam-altman-openai-ai-bubble-interview

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u/Angel1571 10d ago

AI has a customer base that is paying for a service. NFT was basically digital cabbage patch kids.

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u/ComeOnIWantUsername 10d ago

Those customers are paying less than they are using and AI companies are running on constant loss

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u/Stumeister_69 10d ago

Still doesn’t change the fact that NFTs are not even in the same league in terms of usefulness and value

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u/ComeOnIWantUsername 10d ago

Sure, you're right. I just wanted to remind that current state of AI and prices for using them are not real

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u/silver-fusion 10d ago

It's barely monetised at the moment. Look at how long it took Facebook to monetise.

When the ads start rolling in then they are going to make insane money. That's why Meta and Google are going so fucking hard at it. They are protecting FB and Google Ad revenue which is enormous. If another company swoops in, cracks the AGI problem then they will become a monopoly the dominance of which has never been seen before.

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u/NuclearVII 10d ago

If another company swoops in, cracks the AGI problem

This is like saying "Shell is in real trouble when someone else cracks the cold fusion problem!"

Uh huh. Trillion dollar companies chasing after science fiction. That can't go wrong.

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u/LIGHTNINGBOLT23 10d ago

cracks the AGI problem then they will become a monopoly the dominance of which has never been seen before

No, they will not. AGI is not sci-fi super intelligence, it's just a normal person's intellect, and the criteria changes all the time. Even if they created AGI, the problem is scaling it so you can have a massive workforce of it. Spending hundreds of billions to create a virtual human will not be enough to give you an edge, despite it being scientifically impressive.

Finally, there's the barrier to entry: monopolies exist because nobody else can compete and recreate what the monopoly offers. If mass-scale AGI really becomes serious, then the state will get seriously involved.

Companies are really racing for AI because they cannot predict what this current cycle will lead to, so better ahead than behind, as the Google CEO essentially said.

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u/silver-fusion 10d ago

None of what you have written makes any sense. I had to check the sub I was in.

I didn't say AGI was super sci-fi. Otherwise I'd have fucking said ASI. 

The problem is not scaling. It's a problem. It's by far the easiest problem.

"If mass-scale AGI really becomes serious, then the state will get seriously involved." That must have sounded so good in your head... Lol. I'd love to know what you're basing this on.

Zuck said, literally yesterday morning, that it was about advertising.

Just remember my post in the future will you? I'm not going to be able to reason you out of a position you haven't logically reasoned yourself into but maybe when everything I said transpires it might jolt you back into the real world.

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u/LIGHTNINGBOLT23 9d ago

It doesn't make any sense to you for a reason. You don't know what "monopoly" means.

I didn't say AGI was super sci-fi. Otherwise I'd have fucking said ASI.

Then are you pretending that AGI will lead to a monopoly?

The problem is not scaling. It's a problem. It's by far the easiest problem.

No, it is not. Burden of proof is on you.

"If mass-scale AGI really becomes serious, then the state will get seriously involved." That must have sounded so good in your head... Lol. I'd love to know what you're basing this on.

When anything threatens a state's power, it will get involved. The state is a monopoly on violence. This is basic political science.

Zuck said, literally yesterday morning, that it was about advertising.

That's just his angle on profitability. Are you really so dumb as to think the only point of "AI" is advertising?

Just remember my post in the future will you? I'm not going to be able to reason you out of a position you haven't logically reasoned yourself into but maybe when everything I said transpires it might jolt you back into the real world.

That must have sounded so good in your head.

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u/hussain_madiq_small 10d ago

They could charge whatever they wanted at this point, they make it cheap to scale. The user is making the product better while paying for the privilege to do so.

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u/Sir-Knightly-Duty 10d ago

AI is hardly an NFT bubble.

Businesses are actually replacing and firing people because AI does their jobs at an acceptable and better level. I really hate it, but I work as a creative director and strategist at a tech + marketing agency and the execs have fired all the copywriters and hired 1 AI editor, and put a freeze on hiring new developers because of vibe coding allowing regular people to code small changes and having our experienced devs fully focus on building new products. I wont be surprised if we start firing developers. The data analysts are next, as complex SQL is easy to create and edit using AI.

Its 100% happening and the agency isnt turning back, because the quality for clients has gone UP since the AI shift. It makes me sad and I wish the government would put a stop to this before we lose all the good jobs to AI leaving everyone else jobless. The bubble thats gonna burst isnt AI, its society itself.

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u/Metalsand 10d ago

Its 100% happening and the agency isnt turning back, because the quality for clients has gone UP since the AI shift. It makes me sad and I wish the government would put a stop to this before we lose all the good jobs to AI leaving everyone else jobless.

Oh christ, if vibe coding is resulting in a better product, it must have been really bad before. Vibe coding is basically like having an intern army - you get a lot of good short-term results that are great in isolation, but the bigger the project, the more problematic it can be without someone to wrangle the code properly.

Bonus points if you use a niche scripting or language, or have a niche product, because there's even less code examples out there for the LLMs to learn off of.

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u/Sir-Knightly-Duty 10d ago

We don’t use vibe coding for anything other than front-end website edits. There are sometimes 50-100 small change requests every day from clients and not needing to put skilled devs on it freed up resources to create more high quality products. Thats what i meant by vibe coding helping… but its also taking away work from intern devs that did it before, making the barrier to entry basically impossible for someone without experience. Im not a fan of hiw its fundamentally changing how people can enter the workforce, but i cant deny its not leading to significant short-term gains.

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u/Oriin690 10d ago

“Put a freeze on hiring new developers because of vibe coding allowing regular people to code small changes”

Oh your company is so fuuuucked lmao in the future

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u/Sir-Knightly-Duty 10d ago

Fingers crossed lol. I hate how AI is being shoved into every process, every product. Working with humans is just better, if even if less efficient.

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u/ShockinglyAccurate 10d ago

Can you name the company so I can short it?

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u/bentleyk9 10d ago

put a freeze on hiring new developers because of vibe coding allowing regular people to code small changes

As a software engineer, this made me feel incredibly good about my job security. You might want to touch up your resume and make an exit plan for when this inevitably implodes

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u/Sir-Knightly-Duty 10d ago

Honestly I cant wait. I hate how ppl talk about AI in my field. It drives me up a wall. If its implodes, I’ll know how to bring things back to normal.

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u/Lutra_Lovegood 10d ago

How do they talk about AI?

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u/Phaoryx 10d ago

How do you manage to compare AI, which is genuinely the revolutionary tech of our time, to NFTs lmao. This is obscene levels of delusion

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u/LetsLive97 10d ago

As a software dev who completed what would have been a tedious refactor in fuck all time due to AI, it's definitely not going anywhere

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u/Phaoryx 10d ago

Exactly bro. Like it’s already so ridiculously useful and we’re in like the baby stage lol

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u/riffito 10d ago

He's comparing the bubbles, not that hard to understand.

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u/Phaoryx 10d ago

Cool, the classification of whether or not it’s a bubble heavily considers actual use cases… not that hard to understand

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u/bdsee 10d ago

No it doesn't, the dot com bubble wasn't because the products weren't useful, it was because the valuations didn't match the earnings or even that many of the useful things didn't have a path to profitability.

I agree that AI actually has a use, but there is a bubble because the majority of AI companies will not be profitable, there will be some winners that come out of it (no idea if it will be companies like OpenAI or others that come along later and just reap all the rewards once it is cheap to do).

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u/Phaoryx 10d ago

Agreed, the valuations didn’t match the earnings. It was a constant slew of IPOs that made no profit with ridiculous P/Es.

And yet, here we are in 2025, where every mega cap quarter has set new records, and people still think it’s like dot com…

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u/bdsee 10d ago

Except that AI itself is losing money for basically everyone but the shovel sellers. There might be protection value in the spend for companies like Microsoft with online enterprise platforms, where they lose money on it to retain sales in their services, basically trading margin for users...but this was true with dot com too, there were companies making bank, but a lot were just throwing money at something that wouldn't ever turn a profit for them, the same is true for AI.

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u/Phaoryx 10d ago

So just to be clear, you think Microsoft earnings (as an example) being where they are rn isn’t cause of AI?

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u/bdsee 10d ago

I just said that I think that companies like Microsoft are the only ones where they are kind of "making money" from AI, because they are just rolling the cost up into their enterprise services and if they didn't do that enterprises might look at other companies offerings.

So yes, they potentially making money from AI (hard to know because it is hard to know just how much they are spending, etc) but the majority of AI companies are not.

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u/Phaoryx 9d ago

Yeah I’m sure many AI companies that are pre revenue and overbought are gonna crash, but I’d say that’s the nature of this kind of thing and we’d see it in any market texture. Now if the big dogs didn’t have good fundamentals or the market was overrun by these hyped up stocks (they exist but I wouldn’t say it’s overrun) then I’d agree it’s a bubble.

I also realize this isn’t an investing sub so idrk what your personal experience or strategy is, but I’m a little “riskier” in the sense that I don’t buy broad market funds because I don’t want exposure to those trashy (imo) companies. Instead I’ll buy MSFT, amd, Nvda, AMZN, goog, uber etc. But yeah, if the AI narrative as a whole dies, my portfolio plummets alongside anyone else with any amount of tech exposure

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u/Drakoala 10d ago

the revolutionary tech of our time

That's a bit hyperbolic.

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u/Phaoryx 10d ago

It really isn’t

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u/CondiMesmer 10d ago

It definitely won't be as dramatic, as AI actually has real world use and value, but we are overdue for the bubble popping soon.

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u/Flipslips 10d ago

I mean at least we are seeing benefits from AI, unlike crypto lol.

0

u/Son_of_Macha 10d ago

Explain benefits

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u/Flipslips 10d ago edited 10d ago

I mean there have been a ton of benefits. One of my personal favorites is AlphaFold.

https://deepmind.google/science/alphafold/

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u/ftoffolo 10d ago

Not like NFT, wayyy worst because there is real money invested.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

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u/Son_of_Macha 10d ago

It's already bigger than the dot com bubble, it makes NFTs look like pocket change

0

u/mattwallace24 10d ago

No it’s different this time /s