Friedberg sees Alphabet as an 'incredible business' with Gemini as a genuinely better model, but warns the company is squandering its 270M paid subscriber base by failing to put Gemini front-and-center across Gmail, YouTube, and Google One, risking competitive irrelevance vs. OpenAI if leadership doesn't impose decisive product direction.
I think the Google business is profoundly amazing. I think they need to do something with the subscriptions that they have and put Gemini right in front and really do a head-on attack against ChatGPT.” ⚑
Sacks acknowledges Alphabet's strong business and Gemini's benchmark improvements, but warns the company faces a genuine innovator's dilemma — the longer it delays making Gemini front-and-center, the more users entrench ChatGPT as a habit, putting Google in a tough competitive spot.
I do think Google is, is in a really tough spot and the longer they wait to make Gemini front and center, the worse this usage problem gets. I mean, what's basically happening right now is Users are learning a new habit. Totally. I mean, th” ⚑
Chamath argues Alphabet is mispriced at 18x FCF, offers a ~4% yield from dividends and buybacks, has multiple resilient growth engines beyond search (YouTube, cloud, subscriptions, Waymo), and even a worst-case scenario of losing half the search market to AI competitors leaves the business near parity quickly — making it a compelling long.
trading at 18 times free cash flow, which is where this thing's at right now, plus the 4% yield on dividends and buybacks... it just seems like it highlighted that this is not a business that's in decline and is about to die” ⚑