Microsoft Corp and Google-parent Alphabet Inc talked up investments in artificial intelligence (AI) for the second consecutive quarter, but their results on Tuesday suggested any significant growth in sales would be slow.
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 term became a buzzword after 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.
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 he mentioned some of the products the company launched last month, including the ChatGPT-powered Microsoft search chatbot Google’s replacement for Bing. Answer is included.
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 combine its AI research units Google Brain and DeepMind and work on “multimodal” AI, like OpenAI’s latest model GPT-4, which takes not only text prompts but also image input as well as generates new content. Can also respond to.
“I mean there are announcements and things will move quickly. But I think it’s going to take a while to see real tangible results,” said Thomas Martin, a senior portfolio manager at Global Investments.
“As far as making it work in real numbers… think about how long it took Google to break YouTube as an example,” he said, adding that anything significant would take more than a year. It was unlikely to appear in the statements until the time.
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.
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 for 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.
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(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)