Is there any solution to how difficult it is to switch models for daily use? I’ve been daily-driving with Claude for years and I want to switch, but it’s got so much memory on me I’d lose a lot.
I know I can have it make an onboarding “about Farouk” doc for the next model but I’d like to switch models more often and don’t want to do that every time.
Where are all the Reddit thermodynamics experts who were saying this was 100% impossible?
Farouk retweeted
A ‘hello world’ milestone for Project Suncatcher 🚀
After launching our prototype satellite a few weeks ago, we’ve now successfully sent a command up to orbit, booted up the TPU, ran the prompt, and received our first complete response back on earth - a haiku!
Farouk retweeted
Very much this. If a mechanic points out that the brakes on your car are about to fail, the right answer is "wow thanks for warning me" not "my car was perfectly safe until you came along".
Farouk retweeted
Reddit call was absolutely fascinating. Everyone should listen to it as a bellwether for where the internet is going
- AI Mode is increasingly default Google experience
- AI Mode provides rich info and data in line, less incentive to leave search
- AI Mose incentivizes dialog, Google wants to keep you engaged to serve more ads at each turn
- Google will milk search for as much revenue as possible as they transition from a search company to a cloud service and chip company
- As traffic from humans becomes more scarce this will put Google in an increasingly adversarial position to the rest of the internet
- This is a massive headwind to all media type companies who are not destinations
- This is a massive headwind to all content-driven go-to-market motions especially in the SMB. You have seen companies like HubSpot and Monday.com get crushed by this funnel collapse
We are entering the end game - a knife fight for the remaining and dwindling volume of human traffic on the internet
Farouk retweeted
Barclays on Alphabet $GOOGL:
“Cloud was once again the standout performer, growing 103% y/y, reflecting the first small wave of TPU-aaS revenue.”
“The comment about ‘prioritizing user experience first’ (followed by monetization later) admittedly gave us a bit of PTSD...”
“It's becoming clear that blue-link queries aren't growing nearly as fast as total queries, and we worry that more aggressive agentic product flows in Search in '27 may exacerbate this trend.”
“Fair to say this is an investor ‘code yellow’, but not some kind of AI roadkill situation.”
“At 14x '28 EPS with slowing ads growth in '27, shares are still attractive, but may stay under pressure for a bit.”
Farouk retweeted
🚨Countries urging households to prepare / stockpile supplies:
• UK — 3 days (Be Ready campaign)
• Japan — at least 3 days, preferably a week
• Sweden — 7 days
• Norway — 7 days
• Finland — 3 days
• Denmark — 3 days
• Germany — ~10 days
• Austria — 10–14 days
• France — 72 hours
• Netherlands — 72 hours
• Ireland — emergency booklet with stockpiling advice
• Taiwan — 7 days home supplies + go-bag
• Switzerland — about 1 week
• EU — 72-hour recommendation
• Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Poland, Luxembourg, Belgium, Czechia mostly 72 hours
• US — Pentagon’s FORTRESS plan aims for major military bases to operate independently for 90 days (power, fuel, supplies); civilian guidance via Ready.gov remains “several days”
great writeup
My key takeaways from the $GOOGL (Alphabet) Q3 2026 earnings call.
1. Search slowed while query growth hit a five-year high. Search and other ads grew 12% to $63.3B, down from Q2. The deceleration has four parts. FX was the biggest drag. The EU ended its de minimis exemption (duty-free treatment for cheap parcels), which hit APAC retail advertisers. World Cup media budgets landed in June instead of July. And AI Mode queries grew fast on a surface with "lower monetization" than classic Search. The first three wash out over time. The fourth is structural: more usage on a surface that earns less per query.
2. The EPS miss is mostly a SpaceX mark. Revenue grew 25% to $127.6B. Operating income grew 30% to $40.6B, a 31.8% margin. EPS came in at $2.12 against $3.02 expected because OI&E (other income and expense, the non-operating line where investment gains and losses land) swung to negative $8.2B. Most of that was an unrealized loss on the SpaceX stake after its share price fell. My rough math: after tax, that mark costs around $0.55 a share, so it explains more than half the $0.90 gap but not all of it.
3. Q4 Search is already guided softer. Lapping last year's Search acceleration cost about 3 points of growth in Q3 and will cost a couple more in Q4. FX gets slightly worse at current spot rates, mostly in Search and YouTube. The rest of Services won't make up the difference: YouTube ads grew only 9% to $11.2B, and Network grew 1% to $7.5B.
4. The AI Mode ad fix is rolling out but not proven. Ads in AI Mode go international for the first time, and multi-turn ads (ads that stay in a back-and-forth conversation) launch in the U.S. The evidence offered: inside AI Mode, sponsored and organic product listings get similar click-through rates. AI Mode queries run about 3x longer than classic searches, and most are incremental, meaning they would not have happened otherwise. What's missing is any number on how far AI Mode revenue per query trails classic Search. Agentic commerce (AI agents that shop and buy for users) is called additive, and consumer agents arrive in the Gemini app later this year. No revenue is attached to it yet.
5. Cloud doubled. Revenue grew 103% to $30.7B. Operating income was $11.1B, more than triple last year. Margin was 36.2% versus 23.7% a year ago. Backlog (signed contracts not yet booked as revenue) reached $561B, and just over 55% of it, about $310B, converts within 24 months. Two caveats. TPU system sales contributed to the growth but were not sized, and Cloud growth excluding TPUs was described as very strong with no number attached. Also, the rented third-party compute capacity came online only at the very end of Q3, so its margin drag lands in Q4.
6. TPU economics stay private. A TPU is Google's in-house AI chip, sold here as full racks with networking, storage and software. One analyst framed a TPU system at roughly $35B per gigawatt and asked how much of that becomes revenue and at what margin. Neither got an answer, because product-level financials are not disclosed. The cash cycle is clear. A signed contract shows up in backlog, Google builds inventory, and cash arrives on delivery. Inventory is only built against committed contracts. There are nearly 100 TPU customers, including Anthropic (directly and through Broadcom) and Apple, which is scaling pretraining on TPUs. New distribution comes through Oracle and Crux AI, a joint venture with Blackstone. The meaningful revenue ramp is 2027.
7. Free cash flow went negative. Q3 FCF was negative $9.1B on $51.4B of capex. Operating cash flow of $42.3B also absorbed the TPU inventory build and a $5.2B payment on a 2018 EC fine. Trailing twelve-month FCF is $19.7B. The 2026 capex guide is unchanged at $195B to $205B, and 2027 rises significantly, with numbers on the Q4 call. On top of that sit $924B in future purchase commitments and $152B in leases that haven't started and other obligations. Those are contractual maximums, and some have volume flexibility.
8. The return math is stated, not shown. Return on invested capital is said to stay meaningfully above the cost of capital, with no figure. Compute allocation is described as a long-range plan run on ROIC discipline, with no ranking of who gets capacity first. Cloud says it could serve a lot more demand with more capacity. About 65% of Q3 infrastructure spend went to servers and networking depreciated over six years, while TPU 8t claims up to 2.7x the training performance of the prior generation. My view: six years is a long life for hardware that loses that much ground each generation. Shorter lives would mean higher depreciation on top of the capex.
9. First-party model APIs process nearly 32B tokens (units of text an AI model reads or writes) per minute, up 40% QoQ and more than 4x YoY. In its first week on developer platforms, Gemini 4 Argon ramped 3.5x faster than Gemini 3, even with capacity limits. Customers who used Gemini Enterprise in Q3 2025 have more than quadrupled their spend. The Gemini app is at 1B users. This is the clearest evidence that the capex has real buyers.
Bottom line: The operating business beat. Revenue grew 25%, operating income grew 30%, Cloud doubled at a 36% margin, and the headline EPS miss is mostly a paper loss on SpaceX. The stock still fell about 10% after hours, from $322.22 to $288.35, because the market is now pricing cash, not growth. Quarterly FCF is negative, capex runs near $200B and rises again in 2027, commitments total about $1T, and the biggest profit pool is slowing as usage shifts to a surface that earns less per query. Management described every link between the spend and the payoff and did not put any number on them.
Farouk retweeted
I did say we'd be releasing our models periodically...introducing Gemini 4 Carbon, our next frontier model.
Following Argon's release just two weeks ago, Carbon shows the pace at which we’re pushing the frontier, it ranks #1 on the recently updated v5.0 of @ArtificialAnlys Intelligence Index at 59. It also leads across key cybersecurity evaluations scoring 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities, 54.8% on ExploitGym for exploitation, and 71.0% on CWE-bench for patching.
We’re seeing significant improvements in long-horizon tasks even compared to Argon, and we’ve strengthened frontier safeguards.
As we did with Argon, we’re going to roll it out gradually + responsibly. Some trusted cyber defenders will get access starting this week. We'll be expanding it to more partners through our Fairwind Program, ahead of wider availability soon, so hang tight!
Farouk retweeted
as far as I can tell, here are the stated views of tier 1 VC firms on extinction risk from AI so far:
- Denied/dismissed explicitly: @a16z, @khoslaventures, @benchmark
- Silent: @sequoia, @generalcatalyst, @ThriveCapital, @kleinerperkins, @IndexVentures, @Accel, @benchmark, @lightspeedvp
- Acknowledged the possibility: Thiel / @foundersfund, @GreylockVC
- Firm-level stance that avoiding human extinction is an active priority: none yet.
Who is going to lead from the front here?
We've all read the Hugging Face report, we are all staring down the cyber-offensive exponential, biological threats and attacks on physical infrastructure are not far off, and we are still early in navigating the threat landscape. There is no later time at which it will make more sense to act than today.
The frontier labs are already pulling out all the stops. Investors are a major power bloc at the frontier, they can see what's happening more clearly than almost anyone else. They need not see themselves as spectators to an unfolding drama, but instead can be -- and ought to be -- active participants in hardening civilizational defenses during the critical window (now).
That starts by taking ownership of the problem, in no unclear terms, and orienting towards sufficient (not cosmetic) solutions.
Not many people seem to know about Metaplanet, Jaan Tallinn's VC firm.
They are the most AGI-pilled firm on the planet, and are about to flip many of the tier 1s.
> Invested in @GoogleDeepMind in 2011
> Led @AnthropicAI series A in 2021
> Doubled down on Anthropic in every round since. IRR hurdle for deploying capital into anything else was {absurdly high number}% for years
> Anchored the premier AGI hedge funds (+Mythos) + in-house public equities strategy
4-person team in Estonia now managing 10s of billions AUM, liquid after $ANT IPO.
Rationalist roots --> zero bureaucracy, cares about human survival & flourishing as north star, doesn't care who else is investing or how high status a founder / idea is
Founders: congrats! you no longer need to play status games to raise a mega round for your civilization-scale moonshot. You can just pitch @metaplanetfund
Farouk retweeted
#BREAKING: The Federal Election Commission just shut down its web services after a hacking attempt.
Farouk retweeted
ALERT: Several countries including Japan, UK, Switzerland, and Germany, have recently urged citizens to stockpile emergency supplies amid war, disasters and cyber attack fears.
Farouk retweeted
BREAKING: A hacker is attempting to breach the US Federal Election Commission's systems and that agency has had to 'temporarily shut down' its web-facing services as a result, according to an email seen by Reuters reut.rs/4imQyUu