By Abbas Badmus,

Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, has achieved a historic milestone, reporting over $100 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time in its history. The record-breaking performance underscores the tech giant’s rapid expansion in artificial intelligence and strong results across its diversified business portfolio.

Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai described the third-quarter results as a reflection of Alphabet’s strategic investment in generative AI, cloud computing, and subscription services.

“This was a terrific quarter for Alphabet, driven by double-digit growth across every major part of our business. We’re seeing AI now driving real business results across the company,” Pichai said during the Q3 earnings call.

Alphabet’s quarterly revenue has doubled within five years, rising from $50 billion to $100 billion, a growth trajectory Pichai termed as part of the “generative AI era.”

At the centre of this transformation are Alphabet’s Gemini AI models, which now process an astonishing seven billion tokens per minute through direct API use. The Gemini app itself has soared to over 650 million monthly active users, with queries tripling compared to the previous quarter.

The company’s cloud division also reported stellar results, with AI-driven services emerging as a key revenue engine. Alphabet’s cloud backlog surged 46 per cent quarter-on-quarter to $155 billion, driven by increased enterprise adoption of AI tools.

“Our complete enterprise AI product portfolio is accelerating growth in revenue, operating margins, and backlog,” Pichai stated, noting that Alphabet is signing new Google Cloud customers 34 per cent faster year-on-year and closing more billion-dollar deals than in the past two years combined.

More than 70 per cent of Google Cloud customers now rely on AI-powered solutions, including leading global brands such as Banco BV, Best Buy, and FairPrice Group.

Alphabet also reported robust consumer growth, crossing 300 million paid subscriptions, led by Google One and YouTube Premium.

Pichai reaffirmed the company’s commitment to sustainable innovation and long-term growth.

“Our momentum is strong, and we’re shipping at speed,” he said.

The milestone marks Alphabet’s emergence as a dominant force in the global AI economy, setting the pace for competitors as the world transitions deeper into an AI-driven digital age.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS), the renowned cloud computing division of Amazon.com, has revealed plans to reduce its workforce by several hundred employees as part of cost-cutting initiatives. These cuts will affect sales and marketing teams, as well as the group dedicated to technology for Amazon’s physical stores.

In a statement released recently, an AWS spokesperson stated, “We’ve identified a few targeted areas of the organization we need to streamline in order to continue focusing our efforts on the key strategic areas that we believe will deliver maximum impact.”

The spokesperson also emphasized Amazon’s commitment to finding new roles for affected employees.This move follows a similar action approximately a year ago when AWS underwent its largest-ever round of job eliminations, resulting in 27,000 corporate roles being slashed after a hiring surge during the pandemic.

Despite being the largest seller of rented computing power and data storage, AWS faced a significant slowdown in sales growth last year due to reduced spending by corporate clients and delays in technology modernization projects.

Moreover, Amazon’s decision to remove the Just Walk Out cashier-less shopping system from its Amazon Fresh grocery stores in the US and replace it with an automated grocery cart coincides with the cuts to the stores technology team.

The announcement by AWS comes amidst a trend of layoffs in the tech industry this year.

In January, Microsoft disclosed plans to lay off 1,900 employees in its video-game divisions, including at Activision Blizzard, which it recently acquired. Instacart, a global grocery-delivery service, also announced the layoff of 250 employees as part of a restructuring.

In February, Cisco, a network equipment maker, revealed its intention to lay off over 4,000 workers, constituting 5% of its global workforce.

Moreover, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, warned of further job cuts as the company seeks to simplify operations and increase efficiency.

Pichai acknowledged that more “role eliminations” are forthcoming, adding to the hundreds of staff already laid off earlier in the year.

According to Layoffs.fyi, a platform that tracks job cuts in the tech industry, over 70 other tech companies have collectively let go of almost 32,000 employees since the beginning of the year. This indicates a broader trend of restructuring and cost-cutting measures across the technology sector.

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Rapid developments in artificial intelligence could help strengthen defences against security threats in cyberspace, according to the Chief Executive Officer of Google, Sundar Pichai.

According to CNBC, amid growing concerns about the potentially nefarious uses of AI, Pichai said that the intelligence tools could help governments and companies speed up the detection of — and response to — threats from hostile actors.

“We are right to be worried about the impact on cybersecurity. But AI, I think actually, counterintuitively, strengthens our defence on cybersecurity,” Pichai told delegates at Munich Security Conference at the end of last week.

Cybersecurity attacks have been growing in volume and sophistication as malicious actors increasingly use them as a way to exert power and extort money.

Cyberattacks cost the global economy an estimated $8tn in 2023 — a sum that is set to rise to $10.5tn by 2025, according to cyber research firm Cybersecurity Ventures.

A January report from Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre — part of GCHQ, the country’s intelligence agency — said that AI would only increase those threats, lowering the barriers to entry for cyber hackers and enabling more malicious cyber activity, including ransomware attacks.

“AI disproportionately helps the people defending because you’re getting a tool which can impact it at scale.

However, Pichai said that AI was also lowering the time needed for defenders to detect attacks and react against them. He said this would reduce what’s known as the defenders’ dilemma, whereby cyberhackers have to be successful just once in a system whereas a defender has to be successful every time to protect it.

“AI disproportionately helps the people defending because you’re getting a tool which can impact it at scale versus the people who are trying to exploit,” he said.

“So, in some ways, we are winning the race,” he added.

Google last week announced a new initiative offering AI tools and infrastructure investments designed to boost online security. A free, open-source tool dubbed Magika aims to help users detect malware — malicious software — the company said in a statement, while a white paper proposes measures and research and creates guardrails around AI.

Pichai said the tools were already being put to use in the company’s products, such as Google Chrome and Gmail, as well as its internal systems.

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The Chief Executive Officer of Google, Sundar Pichai, has said that artificial intelligence could be used to strengthen digital defence systems and protect against cyber threats.

The Google CEO stated in a column published in the Financial Times that it was important to guard against a future where attackers could innovate using AI and defenders can’t.

With cyber-attacks now a tool of choice for actors seeking to destabilise economies and democracies, the stakes were higher than ever, Pichai noted.

He said harnessing AI could reverse the so-called defender’s dilemma in cybersecurity, which they need to get right 100 per cent of the time, while attackers need to succeed only once.

“To empower defenders, we began embedding researchers and AI approaches in Google cybersecurity teams more than a decade ago. More recently, we’ve developed a specialised large language model fine-tuned for security and threat intelligence.

“We’re seeing the ways AI can bolster cyber defenses. Some of our tools are already up to 70 per cent better at detecting malicious scripts and up to 300 per cent more effective at identifying files that exploit vulnerabilities,” the Google CEO stated.

There is growing apprehension about the increasing power of AI in recent times.

Last year, leaders from 28 nations, including the U.S. and China, gathered at the inaugural AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park, England.

Hosted by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the summit aimed to collectively address the risks associated with rapid advancements in AI.

The leaders agreed to establish a shared understanding and responsibility regarding AI risks. Plans for additional meetings later this year in South Korea and France are in place to further address these concerns.

Reacting to this development, Pichai said those concerns were justified, “but with the right foundations, AI has the potential over time to strengthen rather than weaken the world’s cyber defences.”

He said, “I said last year that AI is too important not to regulate well. Europe’s AI Act is an important development in balancing innovation and risk. As others debate this question, the governance decisions we make today mustn’t tip the balance in the wrong direction.”

“Policy initiatives can bolster our collective security — for example, by encouraging the pooling of data sets to improve models or exploring ways to bring AI defenses into critical infrastructure sectors.”

Further, he disclosed that last year saw rapid and significant technological change powered by progress in artificial intelligence as millions of people continue to use it.

Pichai said as progress continues, society would need to decide how best to harness AI’s enormous potential while addressing its risks.

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CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai has revealed that Google’s AI Chatbot, formerly known as Bard, is now rebranded as Gemini.

This change reflects the evolution of AI technology and its expanded capabilities.

Google’s journey in AI reached a milestone in December with the initiation of the Gemini era, marking a significant advancement in text, image, audio, and video benchmarks.

The flagship model, Ultra 1.0, has surpassed human experts in Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU), covering 57 subjects from math to ethics.

Gemini Advanced, the version featuring Ultra, elevates AI capabilities in reasoning, coding, and creative collaboration.

Serving as a personal tutor or creative partner, it adapts to users’ learning styles. Available in 40 languages on the web, Gemini is extending its reach with a dedicated app on Android and iOS’s Google app.

Gemini Advanced can become accessible through the Google One AI Premium plan, offering an all-encompassing experience of Google’s AI features.

This plan, an extension of Google One’s services, encompasses expanded storage and exclusive product features.

Gemini is not confined to standalone experiences; it is seamlessly integrating into everyday products. In Google Workspace, Duet AI transforms into Gemini for enhanced productivity.

Likewise, Google Cloud customers will witness Duet AI becoming Gemini, promising accelerated development and enhanced security against cyber threats.

Acknowledging the pivotal role of developers, Pichai emphasized their importance in the Gemini ecosystem.

Hundreds of thousands have already embraced Gemini models, and further details about developer-centric advancements are anticipated in the coming week.

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TECH DIGEST- Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) is receiving a significant enhancement, the ability to summarize web articles, as stated in a recent Google blog post. While SGE already offers summarized search results, this new feature is aimed at further aiding users after they’ve clicked on a link. Initially available through Google’s opt-in Search Labs program, the feature is being rolled out gradually, starting with the Google app on Android and iOS, followed by Chrome on desktop.

The new “SGE while browsing” feature offers AI-generated “key points” from articles when users tap on an icon at the bottom of the screen in the Google app. However, it’s important to note that this functionality is limited to articles that are freely accessible on the web and won’t work with paywalled content.

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Additionally, Google is introducing improvements to SGE, such as the ability to hover over words in results related to science, economics, and history to access definitions or diagrams. The clarity of SGE’s coding information summaries is also being enhanced.

Google unveiled SGE at Google I/O in May and has continued refining it in subsequent months. CEO Sundar Pichai expressed satisfaction with user feedback during the company’s recent earnings call, stating that the response has been “very positive so far.” Pichai anticipates that over time, this innovative feature will become an integral part of the Search experience, providing users with efficient access to relevant information through summarization and related enhancements.

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TECH DIGEST– Google is starting a new initiative called “Simplicity Sprint” in an effort to increase productivity and employee attention in the face of a shaky economic climate.

The Alphabet business held its usual all-hands meeting last Wednesday with a somewhat urgent tone as employees expressed worry regarding layoffs, and CEO Sundar Pichai requested advice. Even with the number of employees, it has, Google’s productivity as a company isn’t where it needs to be, according to Sundar Pichai, the firm’s CEO.“I wanted to give some additional context following our earnings results, and ask for your help as well,” Pichai opened, referring to the company’s Q2 earnings report on Tuesday. “It’s clear we are facing a challenging macro environment with more uncertainty ahead.”

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He added, “There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the headcount we have.” He asked employees to help “create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer focused. We should think about how we can minimize distractions and really raise the bar on both product excellence and productivity.”

It comes after the business on Tuesday posted weaker-than-expected earnings and revenue for the second consecutive quarter. From 62 percent a year earlier, when the company was profiting from the post-pandemic reopening and rising consumer spending, revenue growth slowed to 13 percent in the quarter. Although the business doesn’t provide official guidance, CFO Ruth Porat stated that she anticipated some of the issues to persist in the near future.

Additionally, it follows Pichai’s recent announcement that the company would scale down recruiting and investment until 2023 while requesting that workers work “with greater urgency” and “more hunger” than they did “on sunny days.”

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TECH DIGEST – Google CEO Sundar Pichai has admitted he feels a little “jealous” of fellow tech titan Jeff Bezos’ much-anticipated space flight.

The Amazon founder and his brother, Mark Bezos, plan to fly on the first human flight of the New Shepard spacecraft, designed by Jeff’s space-exploration company, Blue Origin. Bidding for one of six seats on the ship reached almost $3 million, with nearly 6,000 participants from 143 countries.

The planned 11-minute trip is the company’s first scheduled space-tourism flight, set to blast the crew 62 miles above the Earth’s surface.

Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, and he said in a 2018 interview that it was his “most important work.”

In a sit-down interview with BBC journalist Amol Rajan, Google’s chief exec said he envied Bezos’ plans.

“Well, I’m jealous, a bit,” he said. “I would love to look at birds from space.”

The comment came as part of a wide-ranging conversation with Rajan, in which Pichai described artificial intelligence as “the most profound technology that humanity will ever develop and work on,” adding: “If you think about fire or electricity or the internet, it’s like that. But I think even more profound.”

Pichai also warned of threats to online freedom, revealed he currently drives a Tesla, and said he wished he had met Stephen Hawking before he died.

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