cloud news
Joseph F. Kovar
“We have used AI to make knowledge accessible in powerful ways. We will continue to embrace advances in generative AI to improve search in thoughtful and purposeful ways. Guided by data and years of experience about what people want and high standards for quality, knowing that billions of people trust Google to give them the right information. , testing and iterating,” said Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
Google parent company Alphabet’s investments in artificial intelligence and the cloud have paid off, and growth in those two areas represents a huge opportunity as the company continues its long track record of innovation. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said:
During the company’s first quarter 2023 financial analyst conference call on Tuesday, Pichai said in prepared remarks to financial analysts that Alphabet is building a cloud business and a long-term He said it continues a “long and exciting journey” to focus on value creation.
Pichai (pictured) focused on prepared remarks around two key themes. The first is Alphabet’s advancement of his AI opportunities for consumers, partners, and the company’s own business.
[Related: Google Cloud Debuts Security-Focused Generative AI Platform]
“I compared it to the successful transition from desktop to mobile computing over a decade ago,” he said. “His investments and breakthroughs in AI over the past decade have put us in a strong position.”
According to Pichai, Alphabet has three opportunities.
“We will continue to develop state-of-the-art large-scale language models and significantly improve our overall product to make it more useful to our users. We empower developers, creators and partners with our tools. [and] We will enable organizations of all sizes to take advantage of and benefit from advances in AI,” he said.
Alphabet has made great strides in all three areas, including the recent introduction of the experimental conversational AI service Bard, the introduction of the PaLM API model that makes Bard even more powerful, and the ability of Bard to help people with their programming and software development tasks. We have made great progress. Cogeneration, said Pichai.
“There’s a lot more to come. We’ve released the PaLM API along with the new MakerSuite tools for developers,” he said. “It provides an easy way to access large language models and quickly start building new generative AI applications. We use generative AI large-scale language models across our security services.”
Alphabet also makes search more convenient with innovations around Google Lens Image Recognition, Multisearch for searching across multiple devices simultaneously, immersive map viewing, Google Translate, and all language models that power search. “We continue to do so,” said Pichai.
“We have used AI to make knowledge accessible in a powerful way,” he said. “We will continue to embrace advances in generative AI to improve search in thoughtful and intentional ways. We know that billions of people trust Google to give us the right information, so we will continue to test and iterate.”
According to Pichai, AI has been the cornerstone of Alphabet’s advertising business for more than a decade, and products like Google Performance Max take full advantage of Google’s AI to unlock untapped incremental conversion opportunities for advertisers. helping you find the
At the same time, Alphabet remains committed to including the highest standards of information integrity in its AI products, said Pichai.
“As an example, our Perspective API helps identify and reduce the amount of harmful text that language models train on, with significant benefits for information quality,” he said. “It is designed to help secure generative AI applications before they are released to the public.”
According to Pichai, Alphabet will use its AI capabilities to generate savings, including improving machine utilization and finding more scalable and efficient ways to train and serve machine learning models. improving its own performance as part of a multi-year effort.
“We are making our data centers more efficient and redistributing workloads and equipment where servers are underutilized,” he said. “This is an important task as we continue to invest heavily in our infrastructure to facilitate many AI opportunities.”
Alphabet’s second key theme is the continued momentum of its Google Cloud Platform business and how it is using it to build one of the world’s largest enterprise software companies.
This growth is due to deep relationships with large companies, a strong partner ecosystem, and product leadership.
Over the past three years, Google Cloud Platform’s annual deal volume has grown nearly 500%, with large deals over $250 million up more than 300%, he said. Nearly 60% of his 1000 largest companies in the world are Google Cloud customers, as are many major startups and millions of his SMBs.
Alphabet has also built a strong partner ecosystem, said Pichai.
“Over the past four years, the number of Google Cloud Partner Certified Practitioners worldwide has grown more than 15x. , we started with zero, and today, over 100,000 companies participate in the Google Cloud Partner Advantage program.”
Alphabet’s chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, used remarks prepared to address the job cuts the company announced in January, saying the company will slow its hiring pace significantly in 2023. said it continues to invest in priority areas, particularly top engineering and technical talent.
Sales in the first quarter of 2023 were $69.79 billion, up approximately 2.6% from $68.01 billion in the first quarter of 2022. According to Seeking Alpha, this beats analysts’ expectations by $950 million.
This includes Google services revenue of $61.96 billion, up slightly from last year’s $61.47 billion. Google Cloud revenue was $7.45 billion, up 28.1% from last year’s $5.82 billion. ‘Other betting’ revenue was $288 million, down from $440 million last year. It also reduced hedge gains by $84 million from last year’s $278 million.
On a geographic basis, Alphabet reported US revenue of $32.86 billion, up from $31.73 billion. EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) revenue increased from $20.32 billion to $21.08 billion. APAC (Asia and Pacific) revenue of $11.68 billion decreased from $11.84 billion. Other Americas revenue was $4.08 billion, up from $3.84 billion.
For the quarter, Alphabet reported GAAP net income of $15.05 billion, or $1.17 per share, down from last year’s $16.44 billion, or $1.23 per share. According to Seeking Alpha, this beat analyst expectations of his $1.07 per share.
Joseph F. Kovar
