After years of hesitation, Google is readying its competitor’s software for the currently popular ChatGPT text engine for public use. Google users should be able to interact with such language systems “very soon,” including to supplement web searches, CEO Sundar Pichai said Thursday.
The internet giant has been developing software based on artificial intelligence that can talk to people for some time. As early as spring 2018, Google demonstrated a program that called restaurants for reservations – and was not recognized as a computer. Criticism was immediately raised that such technology could be misused. Google had its speech software used internally by employees in recent years, but shied away from a broad market introduction because of the risks.
But at the end of last year, the developer company OpenAI made its software ChatGPT public, which can formulate texts in seconds that could also have been written by a human being. The technology caused a sensation, but also caused concern: after all, you can use it to try to cheat at school or university, or to create disinformation on a large scale for distribution on the internet. ChatGPT sometimes gives wrong answers, but this is not recognizable to users. Google will be ambitious but responsible when releasing its speech software, Pichai assured.
The internet company was under strategic pressure from ChatGPT. Archrival Microsoft has invested billions in OpenAI and will integrate the start-up’s software into its cloud platform. According to media reports, Microsoft’s search engine Bing should also be linked to it. Despite years of effort, Microsoft lags far behind Google in web search.
Google felt the lull in the online advertising market
In the past quarter, Google felt the slack in the online advertising market. Advertising activities for the search engine and video platform YouTube fell by about 3.6 percent on an annual basis to 59 billion dollars (almost 54 billion euros). However, gains in cloud services and successful currency deals helped close the gap.
Parent company Alphabet managed to show a turnover growth of 1 percent to more than 76 billion dollars. However, analysts had expected about $500 million more. The stock lost nearly 5 percent in after-hours trading Thursday. The bottom line is that Alphabet’s revenues are down a good third year over year to $13.6 billion.
The business of the video platform YouTube also fell short of analysts’ expectations, with a turnover drop of about 8 percent to just under $ 8 billion. Meanwhile, the cloud business grew from a whopping $5.5 to $7.3 billion. However, it is operationally in the red at $480 million. Still, that was an improvement from a loss of $890 million a year earlier.
12,000 employees have to leave
The number of employees increased from 156,600 to more than 190,000 within twelve months. The group recently announced that about 12,000 jobs would be cut because it had grown too fast for the company during the pandemic. Termination benefits and other related measures are expected to cost $1.9 billion to $2.3 billion in the current quarter.
Some investors also question the high costs for possible future projects such as self-driving cars from subsidiary Waymo, healthcare technology or delivery drones. These territories reported a $1.6 billion operating loss on $226 million in sales last quarter.
Source: Krone
I’m Ben Stock, a journalist and author at Today Times Live. I specialize in economic news and have been working in the news industry for over five years. My experience spans from local journalism to international business reporting. In my career I’ve had the opportunity to interview some of the world’s leading economists and financial experts, giving me an insight into global trends that is unique among journalists.
