The tech behemoth has launched a range of products that they promise are packed with generative AI, which creates brand new content – text, images, code – from past data. The word became the talk of the town after a Microsoft-backed firm OpenAI Released ChatGPT, a chatbot that writes human-like responses.
“The world’s most advanced AI models are coming together with the world’s most universal user interface – natural language – to build a new era of computing,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a statement on Tuesday. (Graphic: Alphabet and Microsoft talk up AI, https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-STOCKS/AI/lgvdkajbepo/chart.png)
With the quarterly reporting season underway, the word “AI” has been used nearly twice as often in conference calls from S&P 500 companies as it was in the previous quarter, a Reuters analysis showed.
Google used the term 52 times in its first-quarter call on Tuesday, 45 times in the fourth quarter. Microsoft said it 36 times, versus 20 — not including references to its partner OpenAI.
Both companies said AI was already juicing sales, but neither said if or when they would start breaking out on any sales, costs or profits from the technology.
“There’s a lot more to come,” Alphabet boss Sundar Pichai said Tuesday after touting some of the products the company launched last month. forageChatGPT-powered Microsoft search chatbot Google’s answer to Bing.
Google, which has touted a flurry of AI tools for its email, collaboration and cloud software, reported quarterly profit and revenue that topped estimates and said it would buy back $70 billion in stock.
It said last week it would merge its AI research units Google Brain and DeepMind and work on “multimodal” AI like the latest model from OpenAI. GPT-4Which can respond not only to text signals but also to image inputs as well to generate new content.
“I mean there are announcements and things will move quickly. But I think it’s going to take some time to see real tangible results,” said Thomas Martin, a senior portfolio manager at Global Investments.
“As far as making it work in actual numbers… think of how long it took Google to break YouTube, for example,” he said, adding that nothing significant has happened in the statements for more than a year. was not likely to appear.
Microsoft’s head of investor relations Brett Iversen told Reuters, however, that “it’s really early” and that AI was still a relatively small part of Microsoft’s overall business. (Graphic: AI dominates quarterly conference call, https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-STOCKS/AI/gdvzqbkgmpw/chart.png)
big players
Nadella said that in the three months since Microsoft made a new AI “Copilot” developer tool widely available, more than 10,000 organizations have signed up, including Coca-Cola and General Motors. The tool is for its product suite which includes Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Outlook email.
Microsoft on Tuesday beat estimates for quarterly revenue and profit, driven by growth in its cloud computing and office productivity software businesses.
Bing has lagged behind Google Search for decades, but Nadella said that since adding AI features, Bing downloads had boomed and now has 100 million daily users.
“Ultimately, this could have huge implications for Microsoft’s enterprise software and perhaps less so in search,” said Haruki Toyama, portfolio manager at Madison Investments.
Toyama said that Google already used AI to monetize its search algorithms and that he did not expect AI to be as dangerous to its rivals as some had thought.
Meta Platforms Inc., which reports Wednesday, and Amazon.com Inc., which reports next week, have also jumped on the AI bandwagon.
Meta, which has admitted it is playing catch-up in AI, has published an AI model that can pick out individual objects from within an image. Amazon’s cloud division AWS, the world’s largest, has released a suite of technologies aimed at helping other companies develop their own chatbots powered by AI.
Shares of Meta and Amazon rose 2.3% and 5.3%, respectively, in after-market Tuesday.
The text of this story is published from a wire agency feed without any modification.
catch all technology news And updates on Live Mint. download mint news app to receive daily market update & Live business News,