Google Inc.

Alphabet announced a $70 billion share buyback and first-quarter revenue beat expectations, pushing shares up more than 4% in after-hours trading.

Share price performance:

Alphabet shares rose 4.11% after-hours

Alphabet Class A shares (GOOGL) opened at $105.82 on the Nasdaq exchange on Tuesday. By the end of Tuesday’s trading session, Alphabet shares were down $2.12, or 2.00%, to close at $103.85. As of 17:22 EST Tuesday (5:22 GMT Wednesday), Alphabet shares were up $4.27, or 4.11 per cent, to $108.12. Over the past 52 weeks, Alphabet shares have traded as high as $122.85 and as low as $83.34.
First quarter results highlights:

— Revenues of $69,787 million, up 3 per cent from $68,011 million a year earlier and up 6 per cent year-over-year on a constant currency basis;

・Total advertising revenue was $54,548 million, essentially unchanged from $54,661 million in the prior-year period;

・Google Cloud revenue was $7,454 million, up 28% from $5,821 million in the prior year period

・Other Bets revenue of $288 million, down 35% from $440 million in the prior year period

— Traffic Acquisition Costs (TAC) of $11,721 million, down 2% from $11,990 million in the same period last year

— operating profit of US$17,415 million, down 13% from US$20,094 million in the same period last year; operating margin of 25%, down 5 percentage points from 30% in the same period last year

— net profit of US$15,051 million, down 8 per cent from US$16,436 million in the same period last year

— diluted earnings per share of US$1.17, down 5% from US$1.23 a year earlier

— Alphabet said that most of the affected employees will not be reflected in the total workforce until the end of the second quarter of the year. The company also said that the majority of affected employees would not be reflected in the total workforce until the end of the second quarter of this year.
Repurchase of $70 billion of stock

Alphabet announced that on April 19, 2023, its Board of Directors authorized the company to repurchase up to an additional $70 billion of Class A and Class C shares in a manner deemed to be in the best interests of the company and its shareholders. The repurchases will take into account economic costs and prevailing market conditions, including the relative trading price and volume of Class A and Class C shares. Alphabet expects the repurchases to be executed from time to time, depending on general business, market conditions and other investment opportunities, through open market purchases or privately negotiated transactions, including through the Rule 10b5-1 program.
Executive Commentary:

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said: “We are pleased with the performance of our business in the first quarter, with good performance in search and strong momentum in the cloud. We launched important product updates, grounded in deep computer science and artificial intelligence. Our Polaris is providing the most helpful answers to our users, and we see great opportunities ahead to continue our long track record of innovation.”

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The technology is being tested at “scale” in Logan, Australia, where Wing delivers up to 1,000 packages a day. The company is also testing drone deliveries in Lusk, a suburb of Dublin.

Wing said they and other companies are in talks with the U.K. Department for Transport and the Civil Aviation Authority to agree on regulations that would allow drone deliveries.

Chief executive Adam Woodworth said the delivery system looks “more like an efficient data network than a traditional transport system.

He added that in the experiment “we did a lot of grocery deliveries, we did a lot of deli deliveries, and we did a lot of coffee deliveries.”

For now, consumers will not be charged extra for drone deliveries. The company has not disclosed the final price of the service. But experts say that in order to be financially sustainable, drone companies will have to make a large number of deliveries.

Dr. Steve Wright of the University of the West of England said it’s no surprise that Wing is one of the companies trying to make home-free deliveries a reality. Everyone is still working on the drones themselves, which will operate non-stop at night and during the day, far more than we’ve ever done before, but now the thinking has shifted to larger application scenarios,” he said. The first issue that companies are now grappling with is regulation. However, the next problem is already looming, and that is how to manage and direct this huge number of robots. And the answer is big data, as both Wing and Amazon have seen.”

Wing’s drone delivery network includes three basic hardware elements: delivery drones, a drone landing and charging platform and an automated loader that allows companies to leave packages for collection.

Using these elements, the company said, drones can pick up, deliver and return for charging in the mode that makes the most sense for the entire system, rather than just flying from a base to a customer and back.

Woodworth said in an interview, “A specific example would be a drone that takes off at one location, it might fly to another business to pick up a box, and then it might fly to the delivery location and then instead of returning to its takeoff platform, it would fly to another adjacent location.”

The advantage of having the system work as a network is its ability to quickly adapt to peaks in demand in a given area. The location of charging pads can also be added quickly.

The company says the system also has a high level of automation, and when a drone is launched, it checks the following things: whether the drone is in the right location, whether it’s carrying the right software, and whether it’s authorized to take off.

Instead of just monitoring one drone, ground pilots can oversee a fleet of delivery drones to ensure they are operating safely and efficiently.

Woodworth said more civil aviation regulators around the world are adopting rules that allow such operations. But the project also has some challenges to overcome, such as complaints from local residents about noise.

Woodworth said the company has put “a lot of work into making the aircraft as quiet as possible. The planning software is designed to avoid creating a “drone highway,” where each flight passes the same houses.

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John Hennessy has served as Alphabet’s chairman since 2018. He said that Google already has the technology of AI processing natural language, but has been hesitant in terms of productization, thinking that this technology is not mature enough to develop a product that can be practically applied, but now, Bard has become a part of Google. Demonstration tools, showing their excellent AI technology.

John Hennessy said he believes that generative AI technology is still a year or two away from a mature product that the general public can use.

John Hennessy made the remarks Thursday at a summit hosted by U.S. venture capital firm Celesta Capital in Mountain View, California.

According to reports, John Hennessy himself has extensive experience in the technology industry, having served as a professor, researcher, and company founder. From 2000 to 2016, John Hennessy also served as President of the prestigious Stanford University in the United States.

At the summit, John Hennessy spoke about key tech industry trends for 2023. He revealed that the ChatGPT tool was released online, and then the content production AI technology caused a sensation, and Google was a little surprised and overwhelmed in the short term.

Last week, in response to ChatGPT, Google released Bard, an AI conversational tool. However, the release of this product was too hasty. The outside world believes that before Microsoft announced the integration of ChatGPT technology in Bing search, Google did this just to follow up with Microsoft.

Bard, who was technically immature, was punished by the capital market. On the day of the release, Alphabet’s stock price plummeted by nearly 10%.

John Hennessy revealed that the Google team did not release ChatGPT’s competing products in the past because the AI conversation tool was still giving wrong answers and the experience was not ideal.

Today’s Google owns a large number of Internet products used by massive users around the world, but in the past, products such as Youtube and web search have provided misinformation or harmful content. This experience has prompted Google to be more cautious when releasing new products.

At the summit, John Hennessy said that Google didn’t want to launch a half-baked product that might give the wrong answer, or even say something toxic.

It is worth mentioning that at an internal meeting last December, Google employees asked CEO Sundar Pichai whether the company was behind in releasing AI conversational tools. Pichai responded that the tech industry needed to be a little more cautious about the impact new technologies might have on civil society.

John Hennessy said on Monday that the language model behind the AI dialogue tool is still in its early stages, and developers need to study how to integrate the language model into the product to improve the accuracy of the answer, and at the same time beware of the output of toxic information, “I think the entire industry We are still working through this difficulty.”

The executive said that Vint Cerf, the inventor of the Internet, would never have imagined that some unscrupulous people would use the Internet to do bad things. Cerf was a former Google executive who developed important technologies underlying the Internet and is sometimes referred to as the “Father of the Internet.”

John Hennessy said that he came from the early days of the Internet. Back then, if he sent spam to others, he might be regarded as “social scum”, but now, for every real email he receives, he will receive ten spam emails, so The whole world has changed, and now people need to think about the role new technologies play in the normal functioning of society. People live together, work together, so new technology can’t create hate, can’t create toxic information, and the tech industry needs to work hard to ensure that.

The executive mentioned that he was impressed with the conversational capabilities ChatGPT has shown, and that ChatGPT has matured faster than he expected.

He said that ChatGPT surprised him in two ways. First, whether it is analyzing the content of human conversations or generating answers (that is, AI generation technology), ChatGPT has demonstrated very good natural language processing capabilities. Second, at least on the surface, Many of ChatGPT’s answers are correct.

John Hennessy declined to comment on the mixed public response to Google’s announcement of Bard last week.

On the same day, John Hennessy also talked about the large layoffs in the US technology industry. He said that the current technology giants have entered a cycle of layoffs. In fact, for many of Google’s new startups, this provides a good opportunity to recruit outstanding technology talents.

He said that in Silicon Valley, start-up companies play an important role. An important survival rule in Silicon Valley is that you cannot lie flat under the glory and aura of the past. Better to die.

The post Why Google hesitates to release ChatGPT competitor: Alphabet chairman reveals why appeared first on TechGoing.

This week, the resulting investment enthusiasm began to spread to two tech heavyweights, Microsoft and Alphabet. While they are all investing heavily in technology, investors have previously favored smaller companies with more hype.

Shares in parent company Alphabet tumbled 7.7% on Wednesday when Google accidentally overturned its Feb. 6 demo of ChatGPT rival Bard, generating erroneous results. The selling pressure on Thursday did not ease. The stock once fell 5.1% in intraday trading that day. In just two days, the market value evaporated by nearly 170 billion US dollars (about 1.15 trillion CNY).

You know, after Alphabet released a financial report that missed expectations, the stock fell only 2.8%, which is enough to show how much investors attach importance to the artificial intelligence arms race.

“For a stock like Google, a drop of this magnitude just shows that investors simply don’t look at the fundamentals,” said Matt Maley, chief market strategist at investment firm Miller Tabak + Co.

Just as Google plummeted, Microsoft was sought after by the capital market, which can be described as a double sky. The stock jumped 4.2 percent on Tuesday after the company explained how it would integrate OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology into its Bing search engine. But analysts seem less enthusiastic, with Morgan Stanley arguing that getting consumers to change their search and browsing habits will be difficult and costly.

Until this week, the artificial intelligence hype in U.S. stocks was largely confined to Nvidia, which develops chips that power complex calculations for artificial intelligence programs. In addition, some small companies with “AI” in their company names have also become the target of speculation. For example, C3.ai’s stock price has doubled this year. Meanwhile, both Microsoft and Alphabet have trailed the Nasdaq 100 over the same period.

Chinese Internet companies such as Baidu, Alibaba and NetEase have also announced that they will expand the scope of artificial intelligence applications, spurring stock prices to rise.

Bill Stone, chief investment officer at Glenview Trust, said that despite Alphabet’s setback, it’s too early to tell a winner from generative artificial intelligence and its associated business model.

“People obviously worry that Alphabet is going to lose its dominance in search, but that’s purely because it’s so dominant, and there’s too much interest behind the search business, but they still have a lot of tools,” he said. shares of Microsoft and Alphabet, and also believe that both companies have the ability to become leaders in this space.”

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