Well, it's happening folks. We have the list of super investors that just reported their 13F filings. This is where we get a look inside their portfolios and see what they're doing if they're buying companies selling companies or just holding on. In this one, we have a pretty big list of super investors. We have Bill Ackman, Michael Burry. We have AKO Capital. This is a quality compounder. We have Christopher Bloomstrand, an old school value investor. We have Valley Forge Capital Management. With our own favorite DevCantissaria, we have Warren Buffett. We have Chris Hone. We talked about him in an interview, but now we actually get to see his changes and we have Terry Smith. All of them have reported what they've done with their portfolio. We're going to be looking over the new companies that they're buying, which companies are ditching and how they're managing their portfolios.
So we have a ton to get into in this episode. Plus, we even have some more. We have the CEO of Google going on to an interview on the All-In podcast and being asked very direct questions that investors are concerned about right now in Google. Specifically stuff like what is the deal with OpenAI and ChatGPT? Is Google in the process of being disrupted? How are they dealing with this? Can Google switch from the old BlueLink economy to this new AI architecture with AI overviews? Do they monetize at the same rate? Is it too expensive to run the website this way? All these different questions that investors have on their mind, causing Google stock to trade below the S&P 500 PE ratio are being asked directly to the CEO. We're going to be looking over the answers.
And then finally, we also have the fail of the week. This is a newer segment to the show. I've done this one time. It was talking about a Morgan Stanley analyst that got the dip completely wrong in 2025. Well, this time we have an editor at Financial Times criticizing Sam Altman about his cooking skills. That's right. Sam Altman had like a 22 second video that was released online. He talks about how he's making some pasta with garlic and he's using some olive oil. And Bryce Elder here, a Morningstar contributor, Financial Times equity contributor, is very upset at the oil that he's using for cooking. And at one point in this article stating that Sam Altman's use of this olive oil is an offense to horticulture.
We'll be going over this as well. So as always, we have a lot to get to in this episode. Let's go ahead and start off and we'll jump into the 13F filings. These of course are the filings that super investors, people that manage over $100 million of clients money, they have to reveal what they're doing every three months. Now, there's a bit of delay. For example, we'll start off with Bill Ackman here. And the delay is we get to see what happened up until March 31st. So that's the end time period to when this was reported. Now again, we start off with Bill Ackman. He manages around $12 billion. He has around 12 stocks in his portfolio.
Now it says 11 here. But remember that Dataroma only tracks US holdings. He also owns Universal Music Group, which is international. And that would be one of the top ones on his list. Now Bill Ackman's portfolio is still concentrated. When you have an investor like him that has the majority of his capital, $12 billion, and only 10 or so companies, that's a very concentrated portfolio. Every position is very meaningful. But some are even more than others. He has the top four or five positions being all above 10%. So these are massive ones, some nearing 20%. Now, if we look at the most recent changes, this is what I want to go over because I think it's important to look at what he's actually doing here. We can organize this by the biggest change.
At the very top, the biggest thing he did is something that we didn't find out today. But we knew this for a couple of months. He publicly released that he was buying Uber. He came out with a big thesis of it. He said the company is trading at very low valuation metrics. The company has huge network effects. And he's not too worried about Waymo or Tesla disrupting the company. So he took a big bet on Uber and so far so good. This stock has done incredibly well since he purchased it. Now, of course, this stock has had a couple catalyst. One of them is just the fact that Bill Ackman bought it. Just because of that news, it went up like 10%. And ever since then, it's gone up even more. So Uber so far has been a great buy by Bill Ackman.
So far so good. And it's a company that I've always talked about positively. I said that I think there's maybe a 10% chance that Uber is disrupted by Waymo or Tesla. So you have to factor in some type of terminal risk with the company. But overall, I believe the odds are overwhelmingly in the favor of Uber to succeed. The network effects are very strong. You can see that even companies like Waymo and other Robotexies are integrating into their network. And they're going to become a hybrid model. So I'm bullish on this company as well.
Now, I get asked routinely, Joseph, why don't you buy Uber? Why don't you buy Meta? Why don't you buy all these different companies? And the simple answer is, I'm not going to own every good company. I have a very concentrated portfolio. There's going to be companies that do well that I don't own. And that's just an outcome of having only a select few positions. The important thing is the companies that I buy do well. So I don't own Uber, but it's one that I'm not bearish on. I actually think the company is going to do quite well.
We look at another thing here. The second biggest trade was that he sold 100% of his Nike position. Now, if you recall, two months ago, I made a video saying that this is going to be what everybody reports because they're not going to be paying attention. Lots of people will tweet out that Bill Ackman sold out of Nike. And that's just not the case. He even said that isn't the case two months ago. He says in early 2025, we converted our Nike common equity position to deep in the money call options.
The structure allows us to maintain exposure to the upside potential of owning the stock outright while unlocking capital for new investments. The positive intrinsic value of these options and their low break-even price minimizes the likelihood of a loss while the multi-year term provides duration through Nike's turnaround, which we believe will ultimately be successful, but may lead to short-term share price volatility. In a successful turnaround, the options payoff should be more than double the return from owning the common stock.
So this is what's going on. A lot of people that have been uninformed on this or haven't really looked into it, they're sending out on Twitter like crazy, that Bill Ackman sold Nike. They're saying he sold the stock. He doesn't want anything to do with Nike anymore. He's turned bearish on it. And instead now he's bullish on Uber. And that is completely false or at least halfway false. He's actually double as bullish on Nike as he was before. If you look at the language again of this press release he gave two months ago.
He says in a successful Nike turnaround, the options payoff should be more than double the returns of owning the common stock. So not only is he bullish on Nike still still invested in the company through just a different structure and vehicle of options, but he's double as bullish. He'll get twice three turns if Nike does well. So he's still bullish on Nike. Other trades that he actually did, he reduced his Hilton worldwide holding by 4.5% of his portfolio that's around a 50% sale. He added to Brookfield Corporation, which doesn't surprise me.
He's still bullish on it. And he did something odd here. He sold a bit of his Google position and then bought the different ticker symbol in Google. This is an interesting thing to see happen. When I looked at the possible reasons of him doing this, there's a couple things we can speculate. First of all, it may be price arbitrage. For example, Google for whatever reason, GOOG has been at a little bit higher of a price than GOOGL. They may have waited until there is a bigger discrepancy and then he sold a little bit of GOOG to go to GOOGL.
So that might be part of the reason. Another maybe potential reason is if he had a different tax basis on GOOG and wanted to swap it for GOOGL, even though you can't do this purely on a tax loss harvesting basis because they're considered the same holding by the government. So interesting to see there's some speculation of why he may do that. Now, the other thing that he did was he further reduced his position in Chipotle, a slight reduction on this one to raise capital for his other buys.
He has his position in Hertz Global and he's reducing this position in Canadian Pacific by a tiny bit. Overall, with the Bill Ackman portfolio, it looks very strong. He's having a lot of success here recently. Uber in particular is leading the portfolio today. It was a great buy so far. So that one's doing wonders for his overall performance. The big one that we'll be looking at is Nike. If Nike can have a big turnaround and he can exercise those options, that will be massive.
Bill Ackman will outperform the market by a long shot if Nike does indeed have a full recovery. Now, of course, next up we have Michael Burry, the big short investor. This one draws a lot of attention every time it's brought up. And in particular, his radical changes to his portfolio. For example, right now it looks like when we look at the activity that he basically sold everything. So he just dumped every position, all these Chinese holdings, all these different companies. And then he bought into S.D. Lauder. That's the only holding in the portfolio.
Now, I say this every single time I cover Michael Burry's 13F filings. I think they're less meaningful and they're less trackable. And I don't believe there's really any signal you can get here. Most of it's just noise because Michael Burry changes around his holdings so frequently that by the time we get his 13F filing of what his portfolio looked like at the end of March, he's likely changed this five more times. He could have back his entire portfolio. This could be a whole different list of holdings than it probably is. Most likely, this is not what his portfolio really looks like today.
So this is again why I warn against trying to follow Michael Burry's trades. He trades around faster than any other super investor that I know of. He's impossible to track. He's not a long-term compounding investor that holds a similar group of companies for a long period of time. My guess is that right now, Michael Burry's portfolio looks completely different than this 13F filing. Now next up, we have AKO Capital, which is a London-based investment firm. They advertise themselves as this one that does rigorous research from the ground up on their companies.
They buy long-term positions in high-quality businesses. So very similar to that compounding machine type of philosophy, but big difference is an outcome. Their portfolio doesn't mimic most long-term compounding investors. For example, when we look at one of their top buys here. This is the big one here. It's F-L-U-T, Flutter Entertainment. They bought this into a 7.42% position. If we look at this in their overall portfolio, it's now their third largest position right after Visa and Alcon.
Now Flutter Entertainment is a gambling company, a sports betting company in particular. They cover everything that has to do with sports betting, daily fantasy sports products, peri-mutual betting products, fixed odd games, betting products, online games, and concenos, lottery, parodapair games, including online bingo, rummy poker, business to business services, so on and so forth. If it's in the sports betting arena or territory, this company does it. So it looks like they had a sudden want to get into this type of business, in this type of sector.
现在,Flutter Entertainment 是一家赌博公司,尤其是一家体育博彩公司。他们涵盖与体育博彩相关的一切,包括每日幻想体育产品、互助投注产品、固定赔率游戏、投注产品、网络游戏、连锁店、彩票、竞猜游戏,以及在线宾果、拉米扑克、企业对企业服务等等。如果与体育博彩领域相关,这家公司都在做。因此,看起来他们突然想进入这种类型的业务和行业。
When we look at some of the highlights of this business, I'll just highlight two of them. They have a dominant US market position. The company has a leading market share in the US sports betting and eye gaming segments, with 43% and 27% gross gaming revenue share respectively. The other thing I'll highlight is this is a technology company. They have an emphasis on exclusive content in-house game studios and innovative product features such as jackpots rewards that drive customer growth and retention, with over 1 million active players in eye gaming demonstrating strong consumer appeal.
When they bought into this position, it was trading at a higher price than it is now. They are in the red on this position currently, which isn't a big problem, but it shows that if you're interested in looking at these type of companies, you can get a better cost-pacest than AKO capital. To fund this purchase, it looks like they trimmed a little bit of proctoring gamble, so they went from a company that's large, established, growing, slow, and highly predictable, to one that's a little bit more immature in a faster growing industry, which is online betting and gambling.
That's a lot more of a current secular trend right now than proctoring gamble. They also sold out of Warner Music Group. They sold out of MSCI. They also bought into Salesforce as a new 1.25% position. So Flutter Entertainment was the biggest one, Salesforce is the next biggest, and my assumption on this is Salesforce got beat up a little bit. They saw the price dropping. Meanwhile, Salesforce is growing moderately with moderate revenue growth and expanding margins.
Now, in my history of investing, I rarely see companies that have long-term moderate revenue growth and expanding margins do poorly. In almost every case, the stock goes up with those companies. In the case of Salesforce, the stock was dropping as they're growing revenue and as they're expanding margins. In my opinion, that will only happen for a short amount of time. We can already see that Salesforce's stock has recovered largely from the lows. I think there's more to go. So I also like this buy as well.
They added to Moody's Corp, which of course is a great one. There's a lot of trading going around with this portfolio, but it's still firmly focused in these quality companies with high margins, deep modes, and moderate to fast growth. It looks like they're dumping some companies that are a little bit more mature, growing slower for the ones that are growing a bit faster.
Next up, we have Christopher Bloomstrand with SEMPRA Augustus. He manages over $600 million. It says here that he has 36 positions, but that's a bit misleading. It gives the impression that he's not making any significant bets because yes, 36 positions. When in reality, once you get past around holding 10, the portfolio waiting or the holding waiting drops to less than 1%. For example, he has a number of holdings here that are a fraction of a percent. These are just watcher positions. He technically has them in the portfolio, but this isn't really a meaningful investment. It's very concentrated towards the top 10 positions, the biggest of which is always Berkshire Hathaway, making up a combined 36% of the portfolio.
Christopher Bloomstrand will tell you that of course you could invest in Berkshire yourself, but he always tries to get in at an intrinsic discount to Berkshire's trading value. If we look at his trades over the past quarter, he is still on the dollar general banwacking. This has been a bet he's made for a while. He added an additional 48% to this position, which is 4.19% of his entire portfolio. This has been a losing position for Christopher Bloomstrand for some time. If we look at his trading here, he was buying the company a lot for $2.45. He bought it more for $2.10. He bought more of it for $1.69.105. 135.153. Or $1.56. 132.84. He sold a little bit at $75. And now he bought more at $87. Overall, his trading in dollar general has not been great.
Christopher Bloomstrand会告诉你,当然你可以自己投资伯克希尔公司,但他总是试图以低于伯克希尔交易价值的内在折扣价买入。如果我们查看他过去一个季度的交易,他仍然在投资Dollar General(他一直在投资的公司)。他进一步增加了48%的持仓,这部分现在占他整个投资组合的4.19%。对于Christopher Bloomstrand来说,这个仓位已经亏损了一段时间。从他的交易情况来看,他曾以每股$2.45大批买入该公司股票,又以$2.10买入,之后还以$1.69、$1.05、$1.35、$1.53买入。他在$75时卖出了一些,现在又在$87的时候增加了仓位。总体来看,他在Dollar General的投资表现并不理想。
He's deeply in the red on this position. If I'm ever given the choice between buying a company like dollar general or one like Costco and paying up for the quality of one like Costco, I'm always going to pick the one that I believe is higher quality. Nothing against dollar general, it may be a better investment in the short term, but ultimately over long stretches of time, I believe that quality wins out. And the PE ratio of these companies can be misleading. For example, dollar general looked very cheap by the PE ratio, but that was only because the analyst estimates were way off. If you had accurate analyst estimates two years ago, dollar general would have been just as expensive as Costco.
That's how far the analyst estimates were off. For example, if we look at the earnings per share, look at them just get crushed. They completely collapse. So the PE ratio on a Ford basis, when you're looking at this company back in 2022, investors and analysts are expecting the earnings to go like that. So the forward PE ratio looks really cheap. When you're looking at it and the analysts, they look at it and they say, oh, the company's going to generate growing earnings. The companies that buy today because look at the PE ratio. In reality, the weakness of the business model, the poor execution, the issues that this company has qualitatively caused it to be unpredictable in its future earnings.
So the earnings start to trend downwards, making it so that the real PE ratio you're paying on a Ford basis was more expensive than Costco at this point in time. Whereas when you're looking at Costco, the company of course trades at a higher PE ratio, but the fact that it's more predictable in its earnings because of its subscription revenue, the company actually grows earnings faster than expected. In most cases, it's more resilient than analysts expect. It pays bigger dividends and bigger special dividends than analysts expect. And that's why this company, which looked much more expensive based on the analysis, was actually much cheaper.
So I have a fundamental disagreement with a lot of the decisions that Christopher Bloomstrand makes. In particular, doubling down on companies that are going through struggle, doubling down on companies that are showing poor execution, declining earnings, and ones that have real intrinsic problems with the company. I don't believe those are the companies that you should be adding to in your portfolio. Now, he's done this again with different positions here. Another one is Paramount. You know my opinion on this again. I focused on the companies I think are the higher quality in this given industry with dollar general and dollar tree, I'd rather buy Costco with Paramount, Disney, all these different streaming companies, I'd rather buy Netflix.
Paramount has been a seismic value trap for investors. One where investors again were forecasting moderate growth and earnings and profits from the company. What they got was a company that was sub-scale. Never got to the point of making enormous free cash flow because to generate the content, they have to generate to get subscribers. They're paying a fortune on a per subscriber basis. They do not have the scale achieved that Netflix has to run a profitable streaming endeavor.
So we look at the revenue. The revenue is slowly declining with Paramount over the past five years, not growing revenue in the top line. The free cash flow continues to go down. When you look at it on a stock-based compensation adjusted basis, it looks even worse. When we look at the net income of the company or the earnings per share, it's deeply in the red now. So this company is continually struggling to survive and the stock price reflux said, it's up 11% this year over the past trailing one year. It's down 2%. Over the past five years, it's down 38%.
Again, at many points in time, Paramount looked cheaper than Netflix. In reality, it was much more expensive because the earnings were going down while Netflix is rapidly growing. Right now, the real highlight of the portfolio is Berkshire Hathaway. That 36% position in Berkshire is really saving this portfolio. The other value traps outside of that are dragging down the performance. They have done so for the past couple of years. And this portfolio has lagged the S&P 500 for a few years.
Now next up, we have one of my all-time favorites, which of course is Valley Forge Capital Management with DevCantissaria. He's very good at investing and he's good at sticking to his plan. That's one of the things I always respect about him is you can see it in the trades. One of the best indicators of a really great investor is underwhelming 13F filings. 13F filings that you look at and you go, oh, not much changed. Looks very similar to last quarter. That is the indication of a great investor because you don't need to change your portfolio if you originally made great decisions.
The people that are constantly shuffling around their portfolio, finding new companies and ditching the ones they just previously held are the ones that are always making poor decisions that they need to reassess and redo all the time. So having a very high turnover ratio can be an indication of some trading strategy, but it's also likely an indication that the investor is not finding quality companies that will simply compound for long periods of time. So the fact that DevCantissaria has underwhelming 13F filings, ones that you look at and you go, there's not much going on here. That's a signal that he's doing something right.
For example, when we look at the biggest trades he did, he actually just did two trades and both of them are slight reductions. He reduced his into a position by 26% and his phycoposition by 2%. Now, without any buy, I believe that this is because of redemption. And the reason that I say that is I don't think that DevCantissaria is the type of person to raise cash. He said before that he only keeps a percent or two percent of cash. He likes holding almost no cash because he believes that his companies are working so hard that the opportunity cost of having any cash is significant.
He likes to be fully invested all the time, no matter the market. And he's come to that conclusion over years. So I'd be surprised if he changes mine on that and he was simply raising cash. More than likely someone wanted to get a little bit of money out of the portfolio and he picked two different stocks to raise cash from. My best guess of why he sold into it and a little bit of phyco is phyco, I think the clear reason why is because this has been a massive winner and it's trading on an elevated valuation.
So we trimmed a little bit of phyco and he's still incredibly bullish on it with a 32% position. Reducing around a quarter of his into a position aligns with his recent moves. I believe with the advent of AI that DevCantissaria is spooked with any type of software company. So you have companies like Google, you have companies like Adobe, you have companies like Salesforce, you have companies like Intuit. And I believe that DevCantissaria is a little bit concerned about all of them.
He doesn't know how AI is going to affect those companies in particular. Now Intuit isn't exactly like Salesforce, it's not exactly like Adobe, it's a little bit more insulated from AI. But if I had a guess, I really think that's the reason why he believes that there's some type of chance that artificial intelligence will make filing taxes easier or make accounting easier and might put pressure on Intuit.
Maybe there's an increasing competitors that are AI startups that are increasing competitiveness with their products. And these other type of companies like S&P Global, like Moody's don't have quite as bit of direct competition yet. Even though there are some ways artificial intelligence could compete with S&P Global Moody's in particular with their risk analytics business. But overall, they're far more insulated than software companies. Now again, this is just my guess. We don't know for sure. Overall, these are still very minor changes. He is still bullish on Intuit. He's still bullish on FICO. He wouldn't have these companies in his portfolio otherwise.
Now next up, we get to Warren Buffett. The name here is Warren Buffett. But I would say that a lot of this is becoming more of a Berkshire Hathaway portfolio than a Warren Buffett portfolio. Buffett's taking more of a backseat with the ongoing trades in Berkshire Hathaway. So we're now seeing different management step up and start to call the shots. When we look at the biggest trades of Berkshire, there's not a lot going on here. We have very small trades, for example, they bought constellation brands. This was exciting for a lot of people.
But it's a 0.45% position. And that's 0.45% of their public holdings. Remember that Berkshire has over half of their portfolio in private companies, all these energy companies and utility companies and insurance and sees candy. This is 0.45% of just the public portion. So very, very small in terms of the total Berkshire portfolio. They also bought a sliver of pool corp. I've done some analysis on that one. You can dig into on the channel. He bought a little bit of Domino's pizza, a little bit more serious XM and so on. But I want to emphasize, even though he's buying these companies, they're not game changers.
These aren't moving the needle. Every single trade here is less than half a percent, except for his reduction in Bank of America. That was 0.79%. Berkshire Hathaway is clearly prioritizing having their massive cash pile, earning a lot of interest and having all of their profitable businesses generate growing operating income year over year. So they're fine, just sitting there outperforming the S&P 500, watching this giant empire of cash and business work together. They feel no pressure to swing at every pitch that's thrown to them.
They're the most secure of the most secure company in the world. The most diversified with the most money, the most undisruptible. So you're going to see more of that over time. We'll see if Berkshire Hathaway does another big trade in the future like they did with Apple, but right now it looks like they're still holding. Next up, we have Chris Hone from TCI Fund Management. We recently did a reaction to an interview from him and got some insight on his investment philosophy. So that gives some better context to his thought process here.
But now we get to see his trades. We organize this by the biggest trades. The biggest one was adding the Microsoft. This is not surprising. Microsoft is a well-diversified, deeply embedded company with high barriers to entry. It has everything that he looks for the reliable income, the brand recognition, the global presence on and on and on. This is the perfect Chris Hone company. Beyond that, he did reduce his Google position slightly. When I look at this slight reduction, I do see investors becoming a little bit more cautious about Google's positioning in this changing dynamic of AI.
They're right in the heart of it with search as we know different investors are making informed decisions on this. And there's smart investors on both sides. You have investors like Bill Ackman and analysts like Mark Mahaney saying that Google is going to be fine to stay in the stock and it's one of his top picks. Then you have investors like Def Cantissaria. You have ones that are becoming a bit more cautious about this paradigm shift in Google. So this one has caused a bit of a disagreement.
I'm still of the opinion that Google is going to turn out to be a good investment. This portfolio is full of high-quality compounding machines. Companies that have high barriers to entry, incredibly good economics, it's the Christopher Hone blueprint that's worked for over a decade and I believe it will work in the future. Now finally we get to Terry Smith. We get to take a look at what's going on with his portfolio. We know that he manages fun Smith, a massive fund with $21 billion just in this portfolio and he has high-quality companies but he's a little bit different.
He's not super concentrated like a lot of these investors are. He's a bit more diversified. So he has a wider range of companies that he looks at. When we look at the activity of the biggest trades that he's done, the biggest one is selling out of Pepsi. So he's selling off this consumer staple. Pepsi is a great company that has high returns on capital, very diversified business but it's on the growth curve of being a slower grower. So you're not going to get super returns from that type of company. You will have more of a defensive, slow-growing one. He also reduced meta a little bit. So we have Pat Dorsey adding to meta at the very same time that Terry Smith is reducing it.
Now if I had a guess which is the right call here, which one's going to turn out better, I think adding to meta right now is going to be better than selling it. Meta is very, it's in a very strong position. I realize that Terry Smith is taking gains here. He has a large position in meta. So this is only a 15% reduction, not a huge deal but I still think he should just hang on to it. He added to a company called Zodis to a 1.74% position. This is a company that is in the health care industry for animals. So it's animal medications. That's a growing industry. It has secular trends and he likes the fundamentals of that business. You can learn more about that one.
He also reduced Microsoft a little bit. Again, this feels like he's simply just trimming down for portfolio management concerns, his top positions. So he trimmed meta, which is a 10% position now. He also trimmed Microsoft, which is a 9%. I think that Terry Smith likes having bigger positions but he's not as comfortable as some investors having these 15 or 20% positions. So whenever they grow that big, he likes to take some gains and reallocate to other companies. His portfolio overall still looks relatively the same with Microsoft and meta being the two significant bets.
Now that concludes the super investors for now. We'll continue to look at their filings, especially going throughout this year as they're reacting to the terrorists and the April news, all the chaos that it's unfolded. Now as we jump further into this, we have an interview from Sundar Pachai. This is on the all-in podcast. One thing I like about it is he's asked very point blank about the biggest concerns that investors have for the company.
Right now, Google's in a position where roughly half their total revenue comes from search advertising. Search is a huge portion of the business, half of it. But then on top of that, search has the highest margins. So it's half of the company with the highest margins, meaning it makes up for over half of the profits of the company. And Sundar is challenged with this task of explaining how Google's in a good position when so much of their revenue and income is based off of this revenue source of search and searches evolving and changing in such a dynamic way with Chatchy B.T. with Lama with other big competitors.
When he's asked about this dynamic change, the innovator's dilemma, the disruption risk. He tries to frame this question, give a bit more of a holistic answer to it. And so he explains for a while here his position and Google's view. And I think it's worth listening to all of it. So this is a bit longer of an answer, but I want to let Sundar explain his entire thought here. You know, I definitely, you know, for almost a decade, you know, one of the first things I did was to think of the company as AI first, who's very clear to us.
We had Google Brain underway in 2012. We acquired DeepMine in 2014, 2015 when I became the CEO, I said, look, the technology is really evolving. The reason we were excited to be approached our workers AI first is because we really felt that AI is what will drive the biggest progress in search. And so, you know, I think even the last couple of years, I viewed this as an extraordinary opportunity for search. I think if you look at how much information means to people, I think they're going to each person is going to have access to information in a way they've never had before.
So it feels very far from a zero sum construct to me. And we are seeing it empirically when people are using search. Obviously, there are a couple of major things we have done with search. You know, transformers draw some of the biggest innovations in search with Bert and Mom dramatically improved search quality. We launched AIO abuse a year ago. It's now being used by over one and a half billion users in over 150 countries. It's expanding the types of queries people can type in.
And we see it empirically, the nature of queries is expanded for the whole new use cases coming into search. We find for queries where we trigger AIO abuse, you know, we see query growth. And the growth continues over time. You know, getting the feedback from AIO abuse, we are, you know, we recently we're testing it in labs. This whole new dedicated AI experience called AI mode coming to search will speak about it more at Google IO.
And in AI mode, you can have a full-on AI experience in search, including follow-on conversational queries. And we're bringing our cutting edge models there where the models are actually working to answer your questions using search as a real native tool. And there the queries, people are typing in queries like literally long paragraphs. The average query length is somewhere two to three times. It's what we seen search as it existed two years ago. So we have seen people respond.
In search is always from the outside people look at it and say search, oh, it kind of looks easy to do. The craft of search is very hard. Over two decades, I think we've had a real not-star of understanding what users want in search. And you know, we, you know, you've been here, we're kind of a very metric instrument company. We kind of know what works, uses our, our not-star. And, and empirically, we see that people are engaging more and using the product more, right?
So, so all that to your question about innovators dilemma, I think the dilemma only exists if you treated as a dilemma, right? Like, you know, say for me, all along in technology, you have these massive periods of innovation and you lean into it as hard as you can. It's the only way to do it. You know, when mobile came, everyone was like, well, you know, it's like you're not going to have the real estate, like how all the ads work, all that stuff, you know, mobile was a transition which ended up working great.
I think you've great examples, right? Like TikTok has come in. YouTube has thrived since the moment TikTok has come in, right? And it was a whole new format. We, did shots when we launched shots. Shots absolutely didn't monetize anywhere in a long form. But we just leaned into the user experience and over time when we figured out monetization to follow. So, you know, to me, you don't think about it as a dilemma like, you know, because you have to innovate to stay ahead and you kind of lean in that direction.
His answer to the innovator dilemma challenge being posed here, I think is a great answer. It's only a dilemma if you treat it as one. The answer that Sundar has every time is to lean in to the new technology. Lean into the innovation. Don't worry about potentially cannibalizing one revenue stream that you have that's existing. Now, in the interview, he talks more about the potential of cannibalization, the higher cost to run AI, the monetization of AI search against the blue link searches. So we'll get to that in a minute.
他对创新者两难问题的回答,我认为是一个很好的答案。只有你把它当作一个难题,它才会成为难题。Sundar 每次的答案都是拥抱新技术,拥抱创新。不要担心可能会侵蚀现有的收入来源。在采访中,他更详细地谈到了可能的侵蚀、运行 AI 的较高成本,以及 AI 搜索与传统蓝色链接搜索的盈利问题。我们稍后会详细讨论。
But I want to address a couple other things you mentioned here. One of the the framings of this is that Google is going to be disrupted because you have things like Chatchy BT, you have AI and it's changing the way that we consume information. So there's potential for disruption there that exists. When we look at AI or any new technology, the natural tendency for humans is to look at what exists and how it's going to replace what exists.
That's what we always do. We look at what currently exists in our field of view, because that's what we know about. We know about what exists. We don't know about what what doesn't currently exist as an experience. So humans naturally look at what currently exists and how this new technology is going to replace or subjugate or do whatever to what currently exists. But what he's saying is AI is going to do things that we don't know exists right now.
It's going to replace things that we're not even doing. So it's not really going to be a replacement. It's going to broaden and increase the scope of what we do with information. And that's happened many times in the past. For example, you can look at the examples he gave like TikTok. TikTok came into view and did it replace anything that YouTube was doing? Not really. Did it weaken YouTube or slow down YouTube? Not really.
It added a brand new way of monetizing and creating videos, which was short form video. The scroll feed, the algorithm, the whole experience doing that, which YouTube adapted implemented into their service and now it's another growing part of YouTube, making their service overall stronger with a new fast growing competitor. Now TikTok also was growing so fast that it scared people. It was getting hundreds of millions of downloads.
It sounded very similar to OpenAI. Isn't that kind of the same story? This new company out of nowhere, nobody knows about all of a sudden it's growing rapidly and it competes with these companies. So it's going to damage Instagram. It's going to damage Facebook. It's going to damage YouTube. It's going to outgrow and take their customers. All of these companies have grown at the same time. TikTok just implemented a new way of consuming information.
You can also look at another example that he didn't list here, but one that I'll provide, which is Uber. If we look at Uber and we compare that to the taxi industry, when Uber was taking over and replacing the taxi industry, many people said this is just replacing one thing for another. Instead of just having taxis, now we have Uber's replacing them. What people didn't think of at the time was Uber eats and food delivery because taxis weren't currently doing that.
You could not get on a nap and order a meal from Taco Bell or McDonald's or whatever restaurant and have it delivered to your doorstep in a couple minutes through your local taxi. The whole idea of it would have seemed crazy at the time. Nobody was thinking of that, but Uber not only replaced some of what was existing, which was the taxi service, but they added on a whole new layer of service with DoorDash and Uber now doing food delivery, which is a massive, massive industry.
Overall, the whole pie of delivering things and moving things around of mobility in general grew. We look at instances like this with any new technology. We view it as a one-to-one replacement, but in most cases, it's going to grow things. It's going to make things bigger overall, and that's the point he made in this three-minute monologue about how Google is looking at this with a much broader perspective. They believe people are going to consume information in entirely new ways.
Not just replacing the blue links, but adding many more search opportunities. They are on the leading edge with all the leading models, with the development, with the infrastructure, with already the know-how. He mentioned that they already have one and a half billion people using AI overviews. They have AI mode that they're pushing out to more users, which is that LLM built into Google search, very convenient, and Google has the latest models that are actually incredibly good.
The latest Gemini models, the AI overviews, are very accurate. So, Google is on top of this in terms of distribution and in terms of technology and performance. Now, moving along this interview, we get to this aspect of the new search queries and how expensive they are compared to the old version. A big argument that the Google Bears have made for some time is that even if Google is able to transition people over from these old searches to the new ones, they're not going to make as much money because the new ones are based on AI.
AI is very expensive to run. We've heard that over and over again so that margins are going to go down and AI is not going to be able to monetize as well because the other ones are more commercial based and these new AI searches are more informational, more learning. They're not as commercial centered. Listen to the way that Sundar addresses these concerns because I think it brings an entirely new perspective to this discussion.
运行 AI 是非常昂贵的。我们反复听到这种说法,所以利润率将会下降,AI 也无法实现盈利,因为其他 AI 更多是以商业为基础,而这些新的 AI 搜索则更侧重于信息和学习,不太以商业为中心。听听 Sundar 如何回应这些担忧,因为我认为这为这场讨论带来了全新的视角。
Look, this is something I think people are really worried about two years ago, but in a wallways felt to the extent that something is about the cost of serving it. Google with its infrastructure, I'd wager on that. And on our chances to do that better than pretty much anyone else. That's the first point. He says, anytime that there's a discussion on cost to perform something or cost to serve something, he's highly confident.
He just says anytime it's a challenge of what, oh, this will be so expensive. Who figures that out better than Google? Honestly, look at their history. You have YouTube. Could any other company imagine running YouTube profitably ever? It has to be conceivably one of the most difficult businesses ever to run profitably. YouTube, there's 20 plus million YouTube videos uploaded every single day, 20 million.
The amount of storage and server capacity to be able to run and distribute that many videos, the streaming, 4K streaming on YouTube, just imagine the server capacity, the technical challenge, the cost associated with that. Another thing that they've turned profitably like clockwork is Google Cloud. It had low margins at one point. It was money losing. Investors were saying, why are you investing so much in Google Cloud?
It's losing hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter. Now it's highly profitable. Bushing up 17% operating margins. The next in line is Waymo. People are complaining that Waymo isn't profitable right now. At scale, Google will make it profitable. It's what they do. They turn businesses that on the surface look very difficult to make profitable into profitable companies.
When you look at Google's search and the challenge of making AI economics work, he is highly confident in their ability to make a lot of money with AI searches. We have actually seen, for a given query, the cost to serve that query is fallen dramatically in an 18-month timeframe. What is probably more of a constrained latency, I would say? It's less the cost per query. I think our ability to serve the experience at the right latency, search has been near instant. How do you think about that frontier? It's been more. He highlights something that, again, I think is interesting. Every investor right now has been focused on the cost to serve the economics behind the query. And for Sundar and Google, it's not even like this isn't even the discussion. That's not what Google's concerned about. As far as they're concerned, they have that challenge solved. They already know it's going to be profitable.
Their big focus is making the queries fast, making it so it's as fast as the legacy ones. And that's more difficult to do with AI. The cost per query is not what I think will end up, I think we'll be able to be done the transition well. That's not a primary driver of how it'll impact things. And do you have a point of view on ad revenue per AI query? We already with AI overviews. We are at the baseline of, it's the same as without AI overviews. And so we've reached that stage. But from there, we can improve, right? And I think they're already right now today as profitable in AI queries as their previous ones. So Google has set a couple of things. First of all, the cost to serve is not an issue. It's just not a concern for them. They've already solved that and they've moved on to other challenges.
And the queries are monetizing at the same rate as the legacy ones. And from there, he believes there's far more upside because they're just getting started with these. Now, a lot of people again can't imagine that you can monetize AI queries as good as these previous ones. They've already done that. But he sees far more upside in monetization with these far more complex nuanced queries. The reason ads have worked well in search is because commercial information is also information. People, when they have that intent are looking for that most relevant information. So I don't see any reason why AI, just from a first principle standpoint, why won't AI do a better job there as well?
And so I think we are comfortable that we can work the transition through. Some of it may take time, but all indicators that we'll be able to do it well. This may be a situation where Google is presented with this challenge, but it's actually a bigger opportunity than it is a challenge. Now, I'm not saying that definitively today, they do face greater competition, but Google does have a lot of opportunity to see this pie grow overall. The next thing I want to highlight is on the infrastructure standpoint. One of the questions being posed here is, why is Google positioning itself so strong in infrastructure? What is the purpose behind that?
And he talks about how it's basically a necessity to have this level of infrastructure to be on the leading edge of technology. You just have to do it. You know, we look at the Pareto Frontier of performance and cost. Google literally is on the Pareto Frontier. So we deliver the best models at the most cost effective price point. Right? Like, you know, and I've always viewed that full stack approach, you know, deep infrastructure, foundation, fundamental R&D on top of it, and then you build an innovative on top of that. And I think that approach will serve us well over time. Google is taking this full stack vertically integrated approach where they're doing basically everything in house.
They have the hardware layer, the infrastructure. They have to know how to make this stuff be servable to the entire world. For example, he says the reason that they can deliver the best model at the cheapest price, that combination is because of their know how they've done this with YouTube. They already know how to serve a large amounts of content, rich content to lots of people across the globe simultaneously and do it at an affordable price. I think the Google CEO is being truthful when he says that this is a bigger opportunity than it is a challenge. Although it faces competition, there is so much opportunity for Google to grow here.
So with Google, it's this continued debate that we keep having. But overall, the stock is doing a little bit better. It's now up to 167. It's making a bit of recovery. It's doing better than the market today. I'm still holding my position.
Now moving on, as we get to our fail of the week, we have here a reaction to a video, a 15 second video. This one is of Sam Altman. It's just a 15 second clip of him cooking something. He's presumably in his own kitchen, putting together a little meal. And people thought it was a little funny, maybe a little endearing, just a bit odd to see someone that's usually in front of Congress or giving big speeches at the White House, now just in his kitchen cooking food. So let's go ahead and just watch it. It's 15 seconds long.
Sam, what are you making? I don't know. It's going to be some sort of pasta and I wrote some specials on the Google sound. It's going to be garlic in the pasta somehow. It looks like an awful lot of garlic right there. I don't think I've ever seen so much garlic. But either way, that's the video.
Now, most people watching this video, especially if you're a normal person, will find it rather benign, unobjectionable, nothing too provocative in that 15 second clip. It just shows him heating up a pan, putting a little oil on it, and he has a little too much garlic. That was the video. And that's most normal people's reaction to watch it and go, huh? Well, interesting to see Sam Altman there, but nothing too spectacular.
That is, of course, unless you're an editor for the Financial Times. In this case, we have this editor named Bryce Elder. He is a contributor to the Financial Times and an equity reporter since 2008 before that he wrote for Morningstar. Now, this Financial Times editor and contributor had a lot to say about this 15 second clip. In fact, you decided to publish an entire article going over what we learned about Sam Altman cooking this food.
Now, if you already think this is crazy, just wait. It gets a lot worse. As we go through it, it outlines multiple things that Sam apparently did that were egregiously wrong during this 15 second cooking video. The first one is that he's bad at olive oil.
And I love that they freeze a video here like it's like some type of mug shot or CTV camera footage of him like mugging someone. It's just him staring blankly in the camera. And he has that olive oil bottle there. And that's a bad thing. He has the wrong olive oil bottle. It goes on to say that that's Grava. It's a trendy brand of olive oil in southern Spain, the world's olive growing capital that are sold through Whole Foods and direct. They're also in Costco. I've seen that exact bottle in Costco as well.
So again, not particularly noteworthy. It says that the cute packaging and squeeze bottle convenience has helped build Grava's following among Instagram types. But its big innovation was to split the range into easy to understand categories. There is sizzle which is advertised as being best for cooking and drizzle, which is for dipping and finishings. Altman sizzles which drizzle. That's his big egregious mistake.
So apparently there's like two types of olive oil. One that's a finishing one you put on after the meal is cooked and the other one that you cook with. And the big sin here is that he cooked with the wrong one. The green bottle indicates it's early harvest when the olives are barely ripe. Harvesting fruit at the start of the season yields much less oil but the flavor the flavors are brighter.
I don't know if Sam knew this or he was aware of the price of this olive oil. Maybe it slipped his mind but Grava's website charges $21 for just 500 ml of the early harvest. And it's labeled as finishing oil. Frying with early harvest is insanely wasteful and quite frankly an offense to horticulture. It's an offense to horticulture.
我不知道 Sam 是否知道这个情况,或者他是否注意到了这种橄榄油的价格。也许他忘了,但 Grava 的网站售价是500毫升的早期采摘橄榄油就要21美元。而且这种油被标注为“顶级佐料油”。用早期采摘的橄榄油来煎炸是极其浪费的,坦白说,这对园艺来说是一种冒犯。
This is what Sam is doing. That little clip you may have not known really the offense as he was doing but it's insanely wasteful. It goes on in this explicit detail of this big tragedy that Sam Altman committed in his own kitchen. Heat deodorizes the olive oil, raising its temperature, obliterating the difference between cheap and expensive oils. By driving out the fragrance compounds that make them taste fresh, spicy, sour, or bitter, the food scientist Harold McGee has shown in blind taste tests that once heat supplied oils all end up tasting the same. So here he is paying $20 for this oil. While the whole time he could have got marginally cheaper oil and had the same results. That's the waste that's going on here. That's the crime that's being committed.
Now how does this guy know anything about deodorizing olive oils and the temperature and how it affects it as being an equity analyst? My guess is I would not be surprised. And I'm being honest here, I'd not be surprised if he used Chatchee BT to figure this out right the sentence. It just wouldn't surprise me if he Chatchee BT why Sam Altman was incorrect in using the wrong olive oil. Now again, this editor here seems very concerned about the value proposition of Sam Altman and him not making the right choice economically with this olive oil.
This is now sufficiently well known. To inform Grazes-Tared pricing, it charges $16 for 750 ml, the late harvest sizzle, and $14 for 750 ml of frizzle. A pulp blend advertises his best for frying because it has higher smoke point. This is contested science by the way. Through ignorance or carelessness, when presented with three choices, Altman chooses badly twice. A responsible cook would be frying with frizzle or literally any other oil for which they could expect to pay around $7 a liter. Altman's input costs are around 6 times the going rate for no discernible benefit.
So there you have the big tragedy of Sam Altman cooking with the wrong oil. The author here Bryce Altar again seems incredibly focused on the value proposition of the different oils. And I don't know how better to explain this than maybe just showing Bryce one thing. I'll just show him one thing that might change his mind on how much Sam pays attention to different prices of olive oils and getting the best efficiency with his dollar on the olive oil.
It's right here. That's the number I would put in front of him. $1.6 billion puts you into a category where it's safe to say at that point in life, you can just pick up whatever olive oil you want. It's not going to make much of a difference. And that's why this is the fail of the week, the overly critical financial times reporting on Sam Altman using the wrong olive oil. That's going to be it for this time. Hope you enjoyed. See you in the next one.