Tech giants companies seem to have become obsessed with artificial intelligence (AI). Recently, CEOs of tech giants such as Microsoft, Meta and Google mentioned AI dozens of times on earnings calls, with the most even increasing fivefold.
A Reuters review of these tech giants’ earnings conference transcripts shows that executives mentioned “AI,” “generative AI (AIGC),” or “machine learning” most frequently compared to the previous quarter. The frequency of references to “AI,” “generative AI (AIGC)” or “machine learning” has increased by up to five times compared to the previous quarter.
On Thursday, Google parent Alphabet mentioned AI 45 times on its earnings call, up from 13 at the end of the third quarter, surpassing Microsoft, which mentioned it 39 times, well above the 15 times it mentioned it in the previous quarter.
AI startup OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot, last November, sparking a race to integrate AI into more products and sending investors betting on which company will come out on top. Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, its efforts to make ChatGPT widely available to its cloud customers and its other plans represent a new challenge to Alphabet.
Industry watchers say embedding ChatGPT in Microsoft’s Bing search engine could give Microsoft an edge against Google Search, which has long dominated the information search space.
Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google and its parent company Alphabet, said Google will remain in the game, a possible recognition of the public’s obsession with ChatGPT. He said, “We’re going to do this boldly with a strong sense of responsibility.”
Pichai also added that AI software will be a focus for Alphabet, which plans to publicly launch its own chatbot software, LaMDA, in the coming weeks.
David Heger, an analyst at Edward Jones, said Google is being more public about its massive investments in AI after keeping quiet. He said, “Google is being more outspoken about how this will benefit almost all of their businesses, and they expect AI to be further integrated into other businesses in the future.”
Evan Spiegel, CEO of social media company Snap, said on the fourth-quarter earnings call that AIGC is critical to the growth of augmented reality (AR), which in turn is critical to the company’s business, over the next five years.
Spiegel said the technology currently has significant limitations because artists must build 3D models, but AIGC can speed up the process. Imagine your child playing with AR glasses and then suddenly shouting, ‘Oh, my God, there’s a pirate ship and a big monster,'” he added. We can make these things come to life with AIGC technology, and I think that’s really exciting.”
Mark Zuckerberg also called AIGC “an incredibly exciting new frontier” during the company’s earnings call, during which he mentioned AI up to 30 times, up from 22 times last quarter. Zuckerberg also said that users can expect the company to “launch a number of different things” in the AIGC space this year.
According to Zuckerberg, Meta plans to apply the new technology to almost all of its products, such as generating images, videos, avatars and 3D assets. In addition, the AIGC software will help content creators create more content in Meta’s apps, and Nicola Mendelsohn, group vice president of Meta’s global business, said in an interview that marketers can use AIGC to help them write copy for paid posts or create images and videos.
Zuckerberg said, “One of my goals for Meta is to build on our research to become the leader in AIGC.”
Even at Apple, where hardware such as the iPhone dominates, AI is seen as an important part of the future. When asked by analysts about Apple’s AI strategy, the company’s CEO Tim Cook responded that Apple is using such technology to support features such as automotive crash detection on the iPhone and Apple Watch, and said it will apply the technology to all of Apple’s products and services.
Cook said, “We see tremendous potential in this space to impact almost everything we do. AI is clearly a horizontal technology, not a vertical technology. As such, it will impact every product and every service we have.”
