Google launched Bard AI, it’s own chatbot to rival Microsoft and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
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Tech investors are eager to hear how much industry leaders are bolstering profitability now that they’re in cost-cutting mode.
But there’s one area where they also want to see hefty investments: artificial intelligence.
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Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta all reported quarterly results this week, updating Wall Street on their efforts to improve efficiency as economic concerns mount. When it comes to AI and the latest boom in so-called large language models (LLMs) that power products like ChatGPT, the mega-cap tech companies can’t afford to get left behind.
Generative AI programs use increasing amounts of data and processing power to produce outputs that seem like they were made by a human — a block of text, a snippet of code, or a computer-generated image. They require specialized supercomputers that aren’t cheap.
On their earnings calls this week, tech CEOs talked at length about the potential for AI, whether they’re building their own models or rapidly integrating it into products. The common theme was their emphasis on the large sums of money they’ll be spending to build and run these applications.
Here’s what executives from Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta told analysts:
Alphabet
Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc.
Kyle Grillot | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Sundar Pichai, Alphabet’s CEO, is under intense pressure to deliver AI products due to the perceived threat that the company’s core Google search engine faces from the sophisticated chatbots hitting the market. The company recently declared an internal “code red.”
Pichai said on Tuesday’s earnings call that the company was making “good progress” towards its AI goals.
“We’ll continue to incorporate generative AI advances to make search better in a thoughtful and deliberate way,” Pichai said.
He said Google is using AI to improve the conversion rate of ads and reduce the amount of “toxic text” that goes into AI models. The company is also combining two primary AI teams, Brain and DeepMind.
Pichai said that in addition to using its own homegrown chips to power its models, it’s using processors from Nvidia, which makes the vast majority of graphics chips used to train and deploy cutting-edge AI.
Microsoft
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks during an interview in Redmond, Washington, on March 15, 2023.
Chona Kasinger | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Microsoft is using OpenAI’s GPT technology in its Bing search engine, Office, and Teams teleconferencing system.
CEO Satya Nadella says that AI will eventually drive revenue growth and is already sparking increased uptake in the company’s apps. Bing, for example, has seen downloads quadruple since Microsoft added a chatbot, he said. Microsoft has generated over 200 million images through its Bing integration.
Nadella warned that a significant amount of capital will be required to build out the massive datacenters needed to run AI applications.
“We will continue to invest in our cloud infrastructure, particularly AI-related spend, as we scale to the growing demand driven by customer transformation,” Nadella said. “And we expect the resulting revenue to grow over time.”
Amazon
Andy Jassy on stage at the 2022 New York Times DealBook on November 30, 2022 in New York City.
Thos Robinson | Getty Images
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy gave an unusually lengthy response on Thursday to an analyst’s question about the company’s generative AI plans.
Jassy said Amazon is building its own LLMs, and designing data-center chips for machine learning, emphasizing that the market is massive.
“These large language models, generative AI capability, has been around for a while. But frankly, the models were not that compelling until about six to nine months ago,” Jassy said. “They have gotten so much bigger and so much better so much more quickly that it really presents a remarkable opportunity to transform virtually every customer experience that exists.”
Jassy also said Amazon’s size would allow it to become one of a handful of companies building LLMs, which can take hundreds of computers running for weeks, overseen by expensive machine learning engineers.
“There will be a small number of companies that want to invest that time and money and we will be one of them at Amazon,” Jassy said.
Unlike Microsoft and Google, Amazon’s focus is selling access to the technology through its Amazon Web Services division. However, Jassy said Amazon will work on some applications, such as programs to help engineers write code.
“Every single one of our businesses inside of Amazon are building on top of large language models to reinvent our customer experience,” Jassy said. That includes voice assistant Alexa, he said.
Meta
Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms, in July 2021.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried to dispel the notion that his company is no longer focused on the metaverse after turning his attention in that direction in late 2021.
But he wanted investors to know that Meta can invest in metaverse technologies while simultaneously putting tons of resources into AI, which he called a “key theme” for his company.
Zuckerberg said that while the company has used machine learning to deliver recommendations and power products like Facebook’s news feed or ad systems, a new main area of focus is generative foundation models.
“It’s been a pretty amazing year of progress on this front, and the work happening now is going to impact every single one of our apps and services,” Zuckerberg said.
He said the company would work on a variety of products using the technology, including chat experiences in WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, tools for making images for posts on Facebook and Instagram, and eventually programs that could spit out entire videos from short descriptions.
A concept he’s particularly excited about is “AI agents,” which often refer to AI programs that can carry out goals.
“There’s an opportunity to introduce AI agents to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful,” Zuckerberg said. One possibility for an AI agent would be to handle customer service for businesses, Meta has said.
Zuckerberg discussed the company’s big investments to build out its datacenters for AI applications. He said the technology was the “main driver” of Meta’s growth in capital expenditures over the past few years.
“At this point we are no longer behind in building out our AI infrastructure,” Zuckerberg said.
That doesn’t mean Meta is done buying graphics processors. Zuckerberg said the company would need to “continue investing,” but would do so after it launches its generative AI products and gets a better grasp on the resources required.
Waymo self-driving cars with roof-mounted sensor arrays traveling near palm trees and modern buildings along the Embarcadero, San Francisco, California, February 21, 2025.
Smith Collection/gado | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Waymo on Tuesday announced it is expanding its service to include another 27 square miles of coverage around the San Francisco Bay Area.
With the expansion, Waymo will now take passengers around Mountain View, Los Altos, Palo Alto and parts of Sunnyvale, California. The Alphabet-owned company opened its robotaxi service to the general public in San Francisco in June.
Waymo will initially limit the availability of its Silicon Valley service to users of the Waymo One app who are residents with ZIP codes in the area, the company said. Waymo plans to serve more riders across the region over time. The fleet of vehicles that will be in use in the new coverage areas are fully electric Jaguar I-Pace vehicles with Waymo’s fifth generation of self-driving sensors, software and other technology.
“Opening our fully autonomous ride-hailing service in Silicon Valley marks a special milestone in our Bay Area journey,” Waymo product chief Saswat Panigrahi said in a statement. “This is where Waymo began and where we’re headquartered.”
Waymo expanded its San Francisco Bay Area robotaxi service last summer into Daly City, Broadmoor and Colma. Its robotaxis do not yet carry passengers to San Francisco International Airport.
A spokesperson told CNBC that Waymo is in “active discussions with SFO,” and added that the company is “working to connect” Silicon Valley and San Francisco to “provide seamless autonomous rides across more of the Bay Area in the future.”
Waymo also recently launched a commercial robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, just in time for the city’s annual South by Southwest festival.
While would-be competitors including Elon Musk‘s automaker Tesla, and Amazon-owned Zoox, are continuing their own robotaxi testing and development, Waymo has pulled far ahead of self-driving companies in the U.S.
Before Tuesday’s expansion, Waymo said it was serving more than 200,000 paid trips per week across San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix.
Alphabet doesn’t disclose financial results for the autonomous vehicle business, but Waymo is part of its “Other Bets.” That business unit generated $400 million in the fourth quarter of 2024 and incurred operating losses of $1.17 billion, according to the company’s most recent financial filing.
Trust & Will founders, Cody Barbo (CEO), Brian Lamb, and Daniel Goldstein.
Courtesy: Trust & Will
Legal technology company Trust & Will said Tuesday that it has raised $25 million in a Series C funding round. The San Diego-based firm, ranked No. 41 on last year’s CNBC Disruptor 50 list, has now raised $75 million to date.
Trust & Will aims to shake things up in the arcane estate planning industry and make these key wealth preservation and wealth transfer services more accessible to families. Relying on a mix of technology and human oversight, Trust & Will provides legally valid documents that adhere to state guidelines.
The company says the funding will be used to double down on artificial intelligence.
“AI enables families and advisors to plan with greater clarity and confidence,” co-founder and CEO Cody Barbo said in a statement announcing the funding. “By combining technology with human compassion, we’re transforming how people protect and preserve their legacies.”
The new round was led by Moderne Ventures, and includes Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, UBS Next and Erie Insurance. The most recent publicly available valuation figure for Trust & Will was $169 million, according to PitchBook data as of June 2022. The company told CNBC its valuation is now in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and has increased by more than 5x from its 2020 Series B valuation to its new Series C, but declined to be more specific.
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Trust & Will started when two friends wondered why there weren’t more online options to create a will. Most of their financial lives were already online — banking, taxes, insurance — but wills would require thousands of dollars and talking to a lawyer. Or a barebones online template that doesn’t leave room for customization or questions.
Its closest competitors, LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, focus on a broader variety of services. There’s also FreeWill.com, which offers free templates for people to fill out.
A recent annual report from Trust & Will found that although 83% of Americans believe estate planning is important, only 31% have a will, and 55% have no plan at all. Today, the company says it has helped hundreds of thousands of families create estate plans and settle probate to solve for that problem, and over one million Americans have started their legacy planning on the platform.
The company works directly with individuals and through partnerships with financial institutions. Trust & Will’s partnerships include Bank of America, USAA and Navy Federal. To get the word out to the general public, the company recently hired its first celebrity brand ambassadors, Super Bowl Champion Matthew Stafford and his wife, podcaster Kelly Stafford, to talk about their estate planning experience in a national TV commercial. It also recently became the official estate planning partner to two professional sports teams, the Los Angeles Kings and San Diego Wave.
“Every family deserves access to estate planning, and every professional deserves tools that simplify the process while delivering exceptional results,” Barbo stated in the release. “This Series C funding is more than a company milestone — it’s a step toward transforming estate planning into an essential service that touches every family’s life and legacy.”
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Hinge Health, a provider of digital physical therapy services, filed to go public on Monday, the latest sign that the IPO market is starting to crack open.
Hinge Health uses software to help patients treat musculoskeletal injuries, chronic pain and carry out post-surgery rehabilitation remotely. The company’s revenue last year increased 33% to $390 million, according to its prospectus, and its net loss for the year narrowed to $11.9 million from $108.1 million a year earlier.
The IPO market has been quiet across the tech sector for the past three years, but within digital health it’s been almost completely silent, as companies have struggled to adapt to an environment of muted growth following the Covid-19 pandemic. No digital health companies held IPOs in 2023, according to a report from Rock Health, and last year the only notable offerings were Waystar, a health-care payment software vendor, and Tempus AI, a precision medicine company.
“We have many decades of work ahead,” Hinge Health CEO Daniel Perez said in the filing Monday. “We hope you join us on this journey.”
The company plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “HNGE.”
Perez and Gabriel Mecklenburg, Hinge Health’s chairman, co-founded the company in 2014 after experiencing personal struggles with physical rehabilitation, according to the company’s website.
Members of Hinge Health can access virtual exercise therapy and an electrical nerve stimulation device called Enso. The company claims its technology can help users improve their pain, reduce the need for surgery and cut down health-care costs.
The San Francisco-based company has raised more than $1 billion from investors including Tiger Global and Coatue Management, and it boasted a $6.2 billion valuation as of October 2021. The biggest outside shareholders are venture firms Insight Partners and Atomico, which own 19% and 15% of the stock, respectively, according to the filing.
Hinge Health’s dual class stock structure gives each share of Class B common stock 15 votes. Almost all of the Class B shares are owned by the founders and top investors.
Employees across more than 2,250 organizations, including Morgan Stanley, Target and General Motors, can access Hinge Health’s offerings. The company had more than 532,000 members as of Dec. 31, and more than 20 million people are eligible to enroll, the filing said.