Why is Google cutting off Search from AI-free schools? Here are some theories

Re:Why is Google cutting off Search from AI-free schools? He... by roosterIllusi0n on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:05PM (#50486406)

The demand is not real. They are hunting for any market that can pay. Nvidia was forcing companies to buy hardware they did not need or they would not be allowed to buy in the future. This created artificial scarcity that skyrocketed prices. Large data centers don't make sense, they require massive expensive grid upgrades to centralize all the gpus. Put those same gpus in each home and no one needs to upgrade anything.

It looks like jensen did this to increase nvidia production, so it would be easier to smuggle gpus to china. US businesses and consumers have had to pay billions more for their hardware because of jensen's smuggling ring.

The only winners were jensen's bank account and chinese businesses that wanted nvidia gpus.

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Re:Why is Google cutting off Search from AI-free schools? He... by cwillu on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:13PM (#50486532)

Started well, that sentence.

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Re:Why is Google cutting off Search from AI-free schools? He... by tenuousemphasis on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:18PM (#50486589)

Most people don't want to pay for inference hardware that sits unused 90% of the time. So concentrating that hardware in data centers does actually make sense.

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Re:Why is Google cutting off Search from AI-free schools? He... by simoncion on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:36PM (#50486849)

> Most people don't want to pay for inference hardware that sits unused 90% of the time.

Enough people have gotten so badly burned by the "SAAS trap" that if people are actually making real use out of it, they'd be very likely to buy the hardware if it was at ~2024 prices.

This is the thing that Altman omitted from his «Local inference won't work out like ya'll think it will.» comment during that interview over beers a little while back.

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Re:Why is Google cutting off Search from AI-free schools? He... by wpietri on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:40PM (#50486939)

Is that always so? That was the theory behind the various video-games-in-the-cloud services, but I don't think that worked out.

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Re:Why is Google cutting off Search from AI-free schools? He... by AndrewKemendo on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:43PM (#50487007)

That was because it wasn’t technically good yet

Unity was notoriously trying to solve this but couldn’t find a way to fix latency

I think Google stadium(?) ran into the same issue

Concurrent shared state at raytracing speed across the internet is basically impossible

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Re:Why is Google cutting off Search from AI-free schools? He... by noah_buddy on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:55PM (#50487179)

I think Stadia was pretty good and someone will figure out that business sooner rather than later (nVidia has a good product as well). Totally changed my mind on the concept of renting a server to play a game.

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Re:Why is Google cutting off Search from AI-free schools? He... by tpetry on Friday November 13, 2026 @02:21PM (#50488431)

I believe the final solution will be that the gaming hardware will be installed at the next edge of your ISP to your home. The minimal latency you can have and much better than routing the stuff over the public net many milliseconds away to one of the main datacenters.

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Re:Why is Google cutting off Search from AI-free schools? He... by dspillett on Friday November 13, 2026 @02:01PM (#50488151)

Most individual people don't want to pay for inference hardware at all. They want an affordable graphics card for gaming. While a lot of people are interested in local inference, there are many more who aren't so they are not at all a majority.

Concentrating the relevant compute resource in DCs makes sense, but to companies seeking to sell AI services, not people overall.

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Re:Why is Google cutting off Search from AI-free schools? He... by wrxd on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:04PM (#50489624)

Most people don't even want to pay for inference. They might use it for free but they're not going to subscribe

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