Tech giants like Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and others have collectively spent more than $28 million on lobbying Congress in the first quarter of 2024 to advocate for their AI tools and influence upcoming regulations in the technology sector. Meta, after facing substantial losses from its Metaverse project, focused on its new open-source large language model, Llama, and led in lobbying spending with $8.5 million. Amazon paid over $5.85 million to 29 lobbying firms while allocating $4.35 million to its in-house lobbying team in the same period.
By Stephen Nellis (Reuters) - For most of the past year and a half, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook has fielded questions from Wall Street analysts about his plans for artificial intelligence amid grumbling that the iPhone maker has no AI story to tell. After the company reported quarterly earnings on Thursday, Cook insisted that Apple will have concrete details about its plans for AI to talk about very soon. "We continue to feel very bullish about our opportunity in generative AI and we're making significant investments," Cook told Reuters in an interview, noting the company has spent $100 billion over the past five years on research and development. Apple's Big Tech rivals have spent comparable or even greater amounts on R&D over the same period, but they have also been spending heavily to build data centers to host AI services. Microsoft shelled out $14 billion in the most recent quarter on capex, with Alphabet's Google not far behind, at $12 billion.
Google and Microsoft reported double-digit profit increases in their quarterly results, with Alphabet's profit rising by 57 percent to $23.7 billion and Microsoft's profit up by 20 percent to $21.93 billion. Google's AI text-to-image model Gemini played a significant role in driving their solid earnings. The strong performance of these tech giants contrasts with Meta's loss of $200 billion market value after warning of higher expenses due to AI investment. Regulators in the US and Europe are scrutinising major AI players for competition concerns and management of AI risks.
Amazon.com reported a 13% increase in revenue to $143.3 billion and a profit surge to $10.4 billion in the first quarter, exceeding Wall Street expectations. CEO Andy Jassy has focused on AI innovations, particularly in Amazon Web Services, which saw a 17% revenue increase to $25 billion and a nearly 84% rise in operating profit. Amazon's stock rose 2% after hours and has increased by 15% this year. The company's advertising revenue grew by 24%, hitting $11.82 billion. Amazon's AI efforts have positioned it in strong competition with other tech giants like Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft.
The US government is set to present its antitrust case against Alphabet's Google, accusing the tech giant of being a monopolist and illegally using its power to maintain dominance. Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to be the default search engine on Safari, as revealed in court documents. The lawsuit aims to curb big tech market power, with Google also facing a second case from the Biden administration alongside Meta, Amazon, and Apple. Despite Google's substantial payments to secure its position, the company argues that user choice is not restricted.
By Mike Scarcella WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government will lay out its antitrust case against Alphabet's Google on Friday in a second day of closing arguments focused on accusations that the online search leader broke the law to stay on top in search advertising. U.S.
ElevenLabs, a leading AI voice technology company, is facing challenges with regulating deepfakes, with CEO Mati Staniszewski proposing digitally watermarking synthetic voices as a solution. Lawmakers are concerned about the potential misuse of the technology, citing instances of phone scams and deepfake exploitation. Despite this, ElevenLabs envisions its technology aiding patients with neurodegenerative diseases and facilitating cross-cultural communication. To combat deepfakes, the company is developing digitally watermarked voices and collaborating with other AI firms like OpenAI, Google, and Meta for the 2024 election.
Alphabet, Google's parent company, achieved a $2 trillion market cap milestone, becoming the world's fourth most valuable public company. The success was driven by Google's search engine and Google Cloud's generative AI services. Alphabet announced a $70 billion expansion of its stock repurchase program and plans to develop its own central processing unit. Despite challenges with AI offerings, Alphabet remains focused on AI for business growth. Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, filed a $2.3 billion suit against Google. Snap's value surged 30% after strong first-quarter results, and the FTSE 100 reached record highs.
Big Tech companies like TikTok, Meta, and YouTube are taking steps to label A.I.-generated content to differentiate between machine-crafted and human content, with concerns about the potential misuse of such technology, especially in the context of elections. OpenAI is launching tools to detect A.I.-created images and is collaborating with Microsoft on a fund to combat deepfakes. Despite warnings, the federal government has not taken action, leaving Big Tech to self-regulate. Social media giants are increasingly implementing measures to identify and label AI-generated content to combat disinformation and misinformation.
Meta Platforms, Inc., doing business as Meta, and formerly named Facebook, Inc., and TheFacebook, Inc., is an American multinational technology conglomerate based in Menlo Park, California. The company owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, among other products and services. Meta ranks among the largest American information technology companies, alongside other Big Five corporations Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. The company was ranked #31 on the Forbes Global 2000 ranking in 2023.Meta has also acquired Oculus (which it has integrated into Reality Labs), Mapillary, CTRL-Labs, and a 9.99% stake in Jio Platforms; the company additionally endeavored into non-VR hardware, such as the discontinued Meta Portal smart displays line and presently partners with Luxottica through the Ray-Ban Stories series of smart glasses. Despite endeavors into hardware, the company relies on advertising for a vast majority of its revenue, amounting to 97.8 percent in 2023.Parent company Facebook, Inc. rebranded as Meta Platforms, Inc. on October 28, 2021, to "reflect its focus on building the metaverse", an integrated environment linking the company's products and services.
OpenAI is a U.S. based artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015, researching artificial intelligence with the goal of developing "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence, which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work".As one of the leading organizations of the AI spring, it has developed several large language models, advanced image generation models, and previously, released open-source models. Its release of ChatGPT has been credited with starting the AI spring.The organization consists of the non-profit OpenAI, Inc. registered in Delaware and its for-profit subsidiary OpenAI Global, LLC. It was founded by Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk serving as the initial board members. Microsoft provided OpenAI Global LLC with a $1 billion investment in 2019 and a $10 billion investment in 2023, with a significant portion of the investment in the form of computational resources on Microsoft's Azure cloud service.On November 17, 2023, the board removed Altman as CEO, while Brockman was removed as chairman and then resigned as president. Four days later, both returned after negotiations with the board, and most of the board members resigned. The new initial board included former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor as chairman. It was also announced that Microsoft will have a non-voting board seat.
LONDON, May 8 (Reuters) - Google parent Alphabet has urged a London tribunal to block a mass lawsuit which accuses it of abusing its dominance in the online advertising market, in the latest case to focus on the search giant's business practices. The lawsuit seeks damages of up to 13.6 billion pounds ($16.9 billion) on behalf of publishers of websites and apps based in the United Kingdom, who say they have suffered losses due to Google's allegedly anticompetitive behaviour. Lawyers for Ad Tech Collective Action asked the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) to certify the case to proceed towards a trial at the start of a three-day hearing on Wednesday.
California Governor Gavin Newsom is partnering with five companies to create generative artificial intelligence tools to improve public services like reducing traffic jams and providing tax guidance. The state aims to harness the power of AI technologies to enhance efficiency. These AI tools, developed by tech giants like Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google-backed Anthropic, are being tested by state workers in a six-month trial. The state's approach includes safeguards and oversight to address risks associated with AI technology.
(Adds link, Microsoft ban on state-backed hacking groups using its AI products in paragraph 22) By Alexandra Alper WASHINGTON, May 9 (Reuters) - The Biden administration is poised to open up a new front in its effort to safeguard U.S. AI from China and Russia with preliminary plans to place guardrails around the most advanced AI models, Reuters reported on Wednesday. Government and private sector researchers worry U.S.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the intelligence of machines or software, as opposed to the intelligence of living beings, primarily of humans. It is a field of study in computer science that develops and studies intelligent machines. Such machines may be called AIs.AI technology is widely used throughout industry, government, and science. Some high-profile applications are: advanced web search engines (e.g., Google Search), recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix), interacting via human speech (e.g., Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa), self-driving cars (e.g., Waymo), generative and creative tools (e.g., ChatGPT and AI art), and superhuman play and analysis in strategy games (e.g., chess and Go).Alan Turing was the first person to conduct substantial research in the field that he called machine intelligence. Artificial intelligence was founded as an academic discipline in 1956. The field went through multiple cycles of optimism, followed by periods of disappointment and loss of funding, known as AI winter. Funding and interest vastly increased after 2012 when deep learning surpassed all previous AI techniques, and after 2017 with the transformer architecture. This led to the AI spring of the early 2020s, with companies, universities, and laboratories overwhelmingly based in the United States pioneering significant advances in artificial intelligence.The growing use of artificial intelligence in the 21st century is influencing a societal and economic shift towards increased automation, data-driven decision-making, and the integration of AI systems into various economic sectors and areas of life, impacting job markets, healthcare, government, industry, and education. This raises questions about the ethical implications and risks of AI, prompting discussions about regulatory policies to ensure the safety and benefits of the technology.The various sub-fields of AI research are centered around particular goals and the use of particular tools. The traditional goals of AI research include reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, learning, natural language processing, perception, and support for robotics. General intelligence (the ability to complete any task performable by a human) is among the field's long-term goals.To solve these problems, AI researchers have adapted and integrated a wide range of problem-solving techniques, including search and mathematical optimization, formal logic, artificial neural networks, and methods based on statistics, operations research, and economics. AI also draws upon psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience and other fields.
(Reuters) - Microsoft is training a new, in-house AI language model large enough to compete with those from Alphabet's Google and OpenAI, the Information reported on Monday. The new model, internally referred to as MAI-1, is being overseen by recently hired Mustafa Suleyman, the Google DeepMind co-founder and former CEO of AI startup Inflection, the report said, citing two Microsoft employees with knowledge of the effort. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. Microsoft has been setting aside large cluster of servers equipped with Nvidia's graphic processing units along with large amounts of data to improve the model, according to the report. MAI-1 will be "far larger" than the previous smaller, open source models Microsoft had previously trained which means it will be more expensive, the report added.
Dario and Daniela Amodei, founders of Anthropic, indirectly criticized OpenAI by praising their own AI models as the best in the world and highlighting their competitive edge. The Amodeis, former OpenAI employees, subtly referenced their former company's AI models during a San Francisco event. They also noted the stability of their team compared to OpenAI, which has seen key members depart. Additionally, the Amodeis discussed their partnerships with Google and Amazon, distinguishing themselves from OpenAI's close ties with Microsoft. They emphasized caution in AI development, learning from social media's past mistakes.
Alphabet, Google's parent company, has announced a 20-cent per share dividend payable on June 17th, marking its first-ever dividend issuance. The company has also authorized a stock repurchase of up to $70 billion. This move follows Meta's similar dividend initiation in February. With $108 billion in cash and securities, Alphabet's shares surged 15% after the announcement, coinciding with better-than-expected first-quarter earnings. Co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are set to receive significant dividend payouts. Tech firms, including Alphabet and Meta, are showing maturity through dividends and buybacks, contrasting Amazon's historical stance of not issuing dividends or large buybacks.
Big Tech, also known as the Tech Giants, are the largest information technology companies. The term most often refers to the Big Five tech companies in the United States: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft. In China, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi (BATX) are the equivalent of the Big Five. Big Tech can also include smaller tech companies with high valuations, such as Netflix and Nvidia, or non-tech companies with high-tech practices, such as the automaker Tesla.The concept of Big Tech is analogous to the consolidation of market dominance by a few companies in other market sectors, such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and J.P. Morgan in investment banking, the Big Three consulting firms, Big Oil, and Big Media.
Apple is expected to report its biggest quarterly revenue decline in over a year, with analysts forecasting a 10.4% drop in iPhone sales, largely due to slow AI service roll-outs and competition from Huawei in China. Despite a $5 billion catch-up from COVID disruptions in 2022, Wall Street anticipates a 5% revenue decline for Apple's fiscal second quarter. To combat this, Apple is in talks with OpenAI and Google's Alphabet to incorporate genAI features into the iPhone, aiming for a major unveiling at its upcoming developer conference in June.
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