Most likely because their operational costs are borderline obscene due to reliance on Google Cloud for their ML pipeline and moving all their metadata to dynamodb.

ML? For what? It’s not like it finds the GIF you’re looking for. Serious question.

I would guess automatic tagging and content recognition.

It chooses the appropriate gif based on a thorough analysis of your personality and preferences. Share and Enjoy!

Most likely for buzzword value.

If you're not paying for it, you are the product. The ML isn't for us, it's for their customers.

They use both GCP and AWS? Hopefully they're not moving large volumes of data between clouds.

having gone through an acquisition, one thing that is for certain is that the acutal money handed over was not anything near 400million.

I suspect that actually it was closer to 75-150 range.