Google execs warn company’s reputation could suffer if it moves too fast on AI-chat technology
Google senior fellow Jeff Dean speaks at a 2017 event in China.
Source: Chris Wong | Google
Google employees are seeing all the buzz around ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that was released to the public at the end of November and quickly turned into a Twitter sensation.
Some of them are wondering where Google is in the race to create sophisticated chatbots that can answer user queries. After all, Google’s prime business is web search, and the company has long touted itself as a pioneer in AI. Google’s conversation technology is called LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications.
At a recent all-hands meeting, employees raised concerns about the company’s competitive edge in AI, given the sudden popularity of ChatGPT, which was launched by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based startup that’s backed by Microsoft.
“Is this a missed opportunity for Google, considering we’ve had Lamda for a while?” read one top-rated question that came up at last week’s meeting.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Jeff Dean, the long-time head of Google’s AI division, responded to the question by saying that the company has similar capabilities but that the cost if something goes wrong would be greater because people have to trust the answers they get from Google.
Billions of people across the globe use Google’s search engine, while ChatGPT just crossed 1 million users in early December.
“This really strikes a need that people seem to have but it’s also important to realize these models have certain type of issues,” Dean said.
A Google spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment
Morgan Stanley published a report on the topic on Monday, looking at whether ChatGPT is a threat to Google. Brian Nowak, the bank’s lead analyst on Alphabet, wrote that the bearish case for Google is that language models could take market share “and disrupt Google’s position as the entry point for people on the Internet.”
However, Nowak said the firm is still confident in Google’s position because the company is continuing to improve search, while creating behavioral change is a huge hurdle for any new and competitive technology. Additionally, Google is “building similar natural language models such as LaMDA” and “we look for further products to come over time,” he wrote.
Sundar Pichai speaks onstage during the first day of Vox Media’s 2022 Code Conference in Beverly Hills, California.
Jerod Harris | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Pichai said at the meeting that the company has “a lot” planned in the space for 2023, and that “this is an area where we need to be bold and responsible so we have to balance that.”
In a tweet over the weekend, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged that ChatGPT has limitations and users should be careful with how much they rely on the answers they’re getting.
“It’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now,” Altman wrote. “It’s a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.”
Google, which has a market cap of over $1.2 trillion, doesn’t have that luxury. Its technology has stayed largely in-house so far, Dean told employees, emphasizing that the company has much more “reputational risk” and is moving “more conservatively than a small startup.”
“We are absolutely looking to get these things out into real products and into things that are more prominently featuring the language model rather than under the covers, which is where we’ve been using them to date,” Dean said. “But, it’s super important we get this right.”
He went on to say “you can imagine for search-like applications, the factuality issues are really important and for other applications, bias and toxicity and safety issues are also paramount.”
Dean said the technology isn’t where it needs to be for a broad rollout and that current publicly-available models have issues.
The AI “can make stuff up,” Dean said. “If they’re not really sure about something, they’ll just tell you, you know elephants are the animals that lay the largest eggs or whatever,” he said with a laugh.
Regarding Google’s internal chat tools that have been available to employees, Dean said that during the pandemic “people would kind of chat with the system for a while and have these engaging conversations” at lunchtime.
Pichai said that 2023 will mark a “point of inflection” for the the way AI is used for conversations and in search.
“We can dramatically evolve as well as ship new stuff,” he said.
Taking Google ‘for granted’
Employees had other concerns about Google search.
The company is coming off its slowest period of growth since 2013, aside from one period during the pandemic. Search-related revenue only increased 4% from the prior year, a slower growth rate than the company’s overall ad business.
At the meeting, Pichai read the following question aloud: “With headlines like ‘Google search is dying,’ it’s not what it used to be, how concerning is this to you, Sundar? And what is the understanding of the common thread behind these concerns and what we can do about them?”
“I think it’s a good question — I’ve read all the articles,” Pichai said. “The progress has been great but it’s also true that people take everything we do for granted and you’re constantly looking ahead.”
Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior vice president who run’s Google’s Knowledge and Information organization, also responded. In July, Raghavan said publicly that Tiktok and Instagram have begun eating into Google’s share of the search market as younger consumers increasingly turn to search on visual platforms.
“There’s no denying, we have to step up and answer and model those queries,” Raghavan told employees. “Users’ expectations keep evolving — they’re asking us new things,” he said. “It does behoove us to step up and address the needs.”
Industry estimates still show that Google holds at least 90% of the search market, and the company remains under scrutiny by regulators. Executives have been more willing of late to talk publicly about Google’s competition in a market where it’s been accused of operating a monopoly.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is seen on stage next to a small robot during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 11, 2025.
Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that, other than artificial intelligence, robotics represents the chipmaker’s biggest market for potential growth, and that self-driving cars would be the first major commercial application for the technology.
“We have many growth opportunities across our company, with AI and robotics the two largest, representing a multitrillion-dollar growth opportunity,” Huang said on Wednesday, at Nvidia’s annual shareholders meeting, in response to a question from an attendee.
A little over a year ago, Nvidia changed the way it reported its business units to group both its automotive and robotics divisions into the same line item. In May, Nvidia said that the business unit had $567 million in quarterly sales, or about 1% of the company’s total revenue. Automotive and robotics was up 72% on an annual basis.
Nvidia’s sales have been surging over the past three years due to unyielding demand for the company’s data center graphics processing units (GPUs), which are used to build and operate sophisticated AI applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Total sales have soared from about $27 billion in its fiscal 2023 to $130.5 billion last year, and analysts are expecting nearly $200 billion in sales this year, according to LSEG.
The stock climbed to a record on Wednesday, lifting Nvidia’s market cap to $3.75 trillion, putting it just ahead of Microsoft as the most valuable company in the world.
While robotics remains relatively small for Nvidia at the moment, Huang said that applications will require the company’s data center AI chips to train the software as well as other chips installed in self-driving cars and robots.
Huang highlighted Nvidia’s Thrive platform of chips, and software for self-driving cars, which Mercedes-Benz is using. He also said that the company recently released AI models for humanoid robots called Cosmos.
“We’re working towards a day where there will be billions of robots, hundreds of millions of autonomous vehicles, and hundreds of thousands of robotic factories that can be powered by Nvidia technology,” Huang said.
Nvidia has increasingly been offering more complementary technology alongside its AI chips, including software, a cloud service, and networking chips to tie AI accelerators together. Huang said Nvidia’s brand is evolving, and that it’s better described as an “AI infrastructure” or “computing platform” provider.
“We stopped thinking of ourselves as a chip company long ago,” Huang said.
At the annual meeting, shareholders approved the company’s executive compensation plan and reelected all 13 board members. Outside shareholder proposals to produce a more detailed diversity report and change shareholder meeting procedure did not pass.
WATCH: AMD working to catch Nvidia
Technology
Blockchain-driven platform to mimic stock trading, allowing users to buy shares of SpaceX, other hot private companies
Artistgndphotography | E+ | Getty Images
Republic, a New York-based investment startup, is offering users exposure to SpaceX by issuing a “tokenized” representation of its shares.
The company will begin selling the digital tokens this week and eventually plans to expand the offering to other private companies like artificial intelligence darlings OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as Stripe, X, Waymo, Epic Games and more. The Wall Street Journal first reported the story Wednesday.
“We’re talking about delivering products to retail investors that they’ve have been held out of previously,” Republic co-CEO Andrew Durgee told CNBC. “The fact that retail investors couldn’t own pre-IPO SpaceX has always been crazy to us. Now that’s going to be attached to the upside of these pre-IPO businesses. The businesses that we target out of the gate we want to have a retail focus, or at least significant retail following.”
In the crypto world, tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.
The move comes as the U.S. crypto industry is testing new regulatory boundaries under President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto administration. Since he took office, the Securities and Exchange Commission has moved swiftly to loosen the restraints left on the crypto industry by the previous administration, ending an enforcement case against Coinbase; closing investigations into Robinhood Crypto, Uniswap, Gemini and Consensys without enforcement action; scaling back its crypto enforcement unit; declaring meme coins are not securities and launching a Crypto Task Force that’s been holding a series of roundtables on crypto asset regulation.
“If you take a step back and look at what the last four to eight years looked like in the space, innovation was very stifled,” Durgee said. “The reality is the space was just difficult for most to understand and consume. Now we’ve gotten to a point where it’s certainly become more mainstay.”
“We’ve moved from what was ultimately … nothing but headwinds,” he added. “And now we’re finally in a place industrywide, where we actually have tailwinds and we have some room to really innovate.”
Republic will allow investors to invest between $50 and $5,000 in the tokens. Typically, those wanting to invest in private companies are required to meet a minimum closer to $10,000 and need to meet specific income or net-worth requirements. Shares of private company can be exchanged by accredited investors in secondary markets; Republic will initially price SpaceX tokens based on how the company’s shares are performing there.
Tokenized private equity is new territory for regulators and the underlying companies being digitally represented. There are outstanding questions about the legality of the tokens, how Republic will give financial information to investors as required, and how selling private investments to retail investors could provoke stress in the financial markets.
“We don’t need a company’s approval to be able to do these types of offerings, and I do think there will be some companies that will want more control over something like that,” Durgee said. “The reality is the structure that we’re using, which was built on securities law from the 1930s, in a lot of instances allows us the leeway to give these types of offerings. People are going to really have to start to question how they’re going to approach some of these innovations, and how far they will want to push that risk envelope.”
Financial institutions are becoming increasingly interested in tokenizing traditional assets because of the often-touted benefits of blockchain technology: lower costs, faster settlement times, greater transparency about ownership and performance and programmable terms, as well as increased accessibility for retail investors and global reach.
The announcement comes about a week after Coinbase said it’s pushing for SEC approval to offer trading of tokenized public stocks, which would give the crypto services provider an additional revenue stream and put it in closer competition with brokerages like Robinhood and eToro.
Competing crypto exchange Kraken recently said it’ll offer tokens of U.S. stocks for 24/7 trading in unspecified markets abroad.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has said he sees the “tokenization of every financial asset” as an important step in “the technological revolution in the financial markets.”
An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) at the AeroVironment Inc. booth during the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference (SOFIC) in Tampa, Florida, US, on Tuesday, May 17, 2022.
Luke Sharrett | Bloomberg | Getty Images
AeroVironment stock rocketed more than 24% higher Wednesday as the drone maker beat fourth quarter expectations on the top and bottom lines.
Here’s how the company did compared to analyst expectations:
- Earnings: $1.61 per share adjusted vs $1.39 per share expected
- Revenue: $275 million vs $242 million expected
The company reported financial results after market close Tuesday and logged record fiscal year revenue of $820.6 million, up 14% over the prior period.
AeroVironment reported net income of $16.66 million for the fourth quarter, or 59 cents per share, compared to net income of $6.05 million, or 22 cents per share, last year.
The company closed the $4.1 billion acquisition of defense tech company BlueHalo on May 1. BlueHalo makes drone and defense technology such as laser weapon systems, with a focus on space tech.
“Our acquisition of BlueHalo further advances our leadership position within the defense-technology sector by adding a complementary portfolio of innovative products and capabilities aligned to our customers’ highest priorities,” AeroVironment CEO Wahid Nawabi said in a statement.
For the new fiscal year, the company said it expects revenues to range between $1.9 billion and $2 billion. The company forecast earnings between $2.80 and $3.00 per share.
WATCH: AeroVironment CEO on European defense spending boost, U.S. defense spending and Trump
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