On Wednesday, Googlepreviewed what could be one of the largest changes to the search engine in its history.
Google will use AI models to combine and summarize information from around the web in response to search queries, a product it calls Search Generative Experience.
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Instead of “ten blue links,” the phrase that describes Google’s usual search results, Google will show some users paragraphs of AI-generated text and a handful of links at the top of the results page.
The new AI-based search is being tested now for a select group of users and isn’t widely available yet. But website publishers are already worried that if it becomes Google’s default way of presenting search results, it could hurt them by sending fewer visitors to their sites and keeping them on Google.com.
The controversy highlights a long-running tension between Google and the websites it indexes, with a new artificial intelligence twist. Publishers have long worried that Google repurposes their verbatim content in snippets on its own website, but now Google is using advanced machine learning models that scrape large parts of the web to “train” the software to spit out human-like text and responses.
Rutledge Daugette, CEO of TechRaptor, a site focusing on gaming news and reviews, said that Google’s move was made without considering the interests of publishers and Google’s AI amounts to lifting content.
“Their focus is on zero-click searches that use information from publishers and writers who spend time and effort creating quality content, without offering any benefit other than the potential of a click,” Rutledge told CNBC. “Thus far, AI has been quick to reuse others’ information with zero benefit to them, and in cases like Google Bard doesn’t even offer attribution as to where the information it’s using came from.”
Luther Lowe, a longtime Google critic and chief of public policy at Yelp, said that Google’s update is part of a decades-long strategy to keep users on the site for longer, instead of sending them to the sites that originally hosted the information.
“The exclusionary self-preferencing of Google’s ChatGPT clone into search is the final chapter of bloodletting the web,” Lowe told CNBC.
According to SearchEngineLand, a news website that closely tracks changes to Google’s search engine, the AI-generated results are displayed above the organic search results in testing so far.
SGE comes in a differently colored box — green in the example — and includes boxed links to three websites on the right side. In Google’s primary example, all three of the website headlines were cut off.
Google says that the information isn’t taken from the websites, but is instead corroborated by the links. SearchEngineLand said the SGE approach was an improvement and a “healthier” way to link than Google’s Bard chatbot, which rarely linked to publisher websites.
Some publishers are wondering if they can prevent AI firms such as Google from scraping their content to train their models. Companies such as the firm behind Stable Diffusion are already facing lawsuits from data owners, but the right to scrape web data for AI remains an undecided frontier. Other companies, such as Reddit, have announced plans to charge for access to their data.
Leading the charge in the publishing world is Barry Diller, Chairman of IAC, which owns websites including All Recipes, People Magazine and The Daily Beast.
“If all the world’s information is able to be sucked up into this maw, and then essentially repackaged in declarative sentences, in what’s called chat, but it isn’t chat — as many grafs as you want, 25 on any subject — there will be no publishing, because it will be impossible,” Diller said last month at a conference.
“What you have to do is get the industry to say that you cannot scrape our content, until you work out systems where the publisher gets some avenue towards payment,” Diller continued, saying that Google will face this problem.
Diller says he believes publishers can sue AI firms under copyright law and that current “fair use” restrictions need to be redefined. The Financial Times reported on Wednesday that Diller is leading a group of publishers “that is going to say we are going to change copyright law if necessary.” An IAC spokesperson declined to make Diller available for an interview.
One challenge facing publishers is confirming that their content is being used by an AI. Google did not reveal training sources for its large language model that underpins SGE, PaLM 2, and Daugette says while he’s seen examples of quotes and review scores from competitors repurposed on Bard without attribution, it’s hard to tell when the information is from his site without directly linked sources.
Google didn’t respond to a request for comment. “PaLM 2 is trained on a wide range of openly available data on the internet and we obviously value the health of the web ecosystem. And that’s really part of the way we think about how we build our products, to ensure that we have a healthy ecosystem where creators are a part of that thriving ecosystem,” Google VP of Research Zoubin Ghahramani said in a media briefing earlier this week.
Daugette says that Google’s moves make being an independent publisher tough.
“I think it’s really frustrating for our industry to have to worry about our hard work being taken, when so many colleagues are being laid off,” Daugette said. “It’s just not okay.”
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon speaks at the Computex forum in Taipei, Taiwan, June 3, 2024.
Ann Wang | Reuters
Qualcomm said on Tuesday that it expects its push into new markets to generate an additional $22 billion per year by 2029.
Of that amount, roughly $4 billion will come from PC chips, Qualcomm said at its investor day on Tuesday. The chipmaker just introduced PC processors earlier this year, when it released Snapdragon X for Windows devices.
The latest forecast marks an important milestone for Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon, who took over the company in 2021 with a promise to get past a reliance on smartphones. In fiscal 2024, Qualcomm’s handset business reported $24.86 billion in sales, about 75% of its entire chip business.
Qualcomm also said on Tuesday that automotive revenues would rise about 175% by 2029 to $8 billion, of which 80% is tied to contracts that have already been secured.
“We have been on this trajectory realizing that the technologies we have developed over the many years can be very relevant to a number of different industries beyond mobile,” Amon said at the investor event.
Another $4 billion in revenue will come from industrial chips and $2 billion will come from chips for headsets, a category Qualcomm calls XR. About $4 billion of the forecast is a catch-all for other chip sales, like those for wireless headphones and tablets.
Qualcomm shares are up 16% this year, trailing the Nasdaq, which has gained 26%.
Qualcomm grew rapidly over the past decade as its modems and processors became essential parts for high-end smartphones, especially those running Google Android. Qualcomm also sells modems and related parts to Apple for its iPhones.
But the company has warned investors that Apple could choose to stop buying Qualcomm parts as soon as 2027. Qualcomm said on Tuesday that its growing businesses will more than offset any losses from Apple.
A Li Auto L9 electric vehicle (EV) is seen displayed at the Qualcomm booth during the first China International Supply Chain Expo (CISCE) in Beijing, China November 28, 2023.
Florence Lo | Reuters
Qualcomm’s strategy under Amon has been to use the technology its developed for its handset chips, like modems, processors, and AI accelerators, in new markets, including cars, PCs, and virtual reality. The investor event was the first time in years that the company has given a forecast for those new markets. Qualcomm said its total addressable market is as large as $900 billion.
“We put a strategy in ’21, and we’re not changing our strategy,” Amon said.
Laptop and desktop chips are currently dominated by Intel, which has over 70% percent of the market, according to Mercury Research. Intel reported $29 billion in PC chip sales in its 2023.
“The competitive landscape changed between the Windows and Macs,” Amon said, referring to Apple’s move in 2020 to switch from Intel to its own processors. “We saw that as an opportunity, especially as the ecosystem did not have confidence in the existing players to actually deliver a solution.”
The forecast for XR headsets also hints at the growth potential of the VR market over the next five years. Qualcomm supplies chips to many of the top headset makers, including Meta for its Quest and Ray-Bans products.
When it comes to artificial intelligence, Qualcomm calls itself an “edge AI” company, in contrast to cloud-based AI that’s typically powered by Nvidia processors. Company officials didn’t rule out introducing data center products in an interview with CNBC.
Qualcomm suggested that its mobile chips will be able to run the kind of advanced AI that’s restricted to large server farms today, an indication that that company may benefit from the AI boom down the road as the technology becomes more efficient.
“What you can run on the cloud last year, you can run on the device this year,” Durga Malladi, Qualcomm’s senior vice president in charge of planning, said at the event.
Options on BlackRock’s popular iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) began trading on the Nasdaq Tuesday, ushering in a new way to trade and speculate on the price of bitcoin.
IBIT traded 73,000 options contracts in the first 60 mins of trading Tuesday, Nasdaq told CNBC, placing the fund in the top 20 of the most active nonindex options.
Options trading allows investors to play bitcoin’s notorious volatility by letting them buy or sell an asset at a predetermined price based on whether they anticipate the price will rise or fall in a given period.
“Bitcoin has a lively derivatives market, but in the U.S. it is still tiny compared to other asset classes, and is largely limited to institutional players,” said Noelle Acheson, economist and author of the “Crypto is Macro Now” newsletter. “A deeper onshore derivatives market will enhance the growing market sophistication. This will reinforce investor confidence in the asset, bringing in new cohorts while enabling a greater variety of investment and trading strategies … [That] should, all else being equal, dampen both volatility and downside.”
The market for options contracts on major ETFs can be extremely active, and are widely used by more sophisticated traders. For example, over the past five business days, Interactive Brokers clients have more options orders on the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) and the SDPR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY) than for the funds themselves, according to data from the brokerage.
The launch of the bitcoin ETF options will likely also lead to new funds that incorporate those options, said Todd Sohn, ETF strategist at Strategas.
“Grayscale already did a filing for a covered call [fund], and I’m sure BlackRock will come out with it too. And then we’re going to get buffers, and then we’re going to get whatever other trend-following-type strategy that folks think of. I think the ecosystem’s really going to start to fly here,” Sohn said.
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The stock prices for H&R Block and Intuit fell after a report Tuesday said Trump’s government efficiency team is considering creating a free tax-filing app.
Intuit, which makes the TurboTax tax-filing software, was down 5%, putting it on pace for its worst day since Aug. 23, when the company’s stock price fell nearly 7%. H&R Block was down 8% and on pace for its worst day since 2020.
President-elect Donald Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency” has held “highly preliminary” discussions about creating the free tax-filing app, The Washington Post reported. The so-called DOGE will not be an official government department but an outside advisory commission. It will be led by billionaire Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and aims to slash government spending.
A DOGE tax-filing app would be a competitor of both H&R Block and TurboTax.
Intuit spokeswoman Tania Mercado didn’t directly address the prospect of a government tax-filing app, but told CNBC in a statement that, “For decades, Intuit has publicly called for simplifying the U.S. tax code so individuals, families, and small businesses can better understand their finances.”
George Agurkis, H&R Block’s director of government relations, said in an email that the company looks forward “to engaging with the new Administration and the Department of Government Efficiency on their ideas related to sound and efficient tax administration.”
It’s unclear where a new DOGE tax app would bridge with newer policies the Biden administration already implemented. Under the Biden administration, the IRS in March rolled out a pilot Direct File program in 12 states, allowing qualified taxpayers to file directly through a government portal. The IRS also offers free filing services through its Free File program for taxpayers who make an adjusted gross income of $79,000 or less.
While both Intuit and H&R Block have free filing options, neither have had stellar records when it comes to transparently offering those services.
The Federal Trade Commission in February filed an administrative complaint against H&R Block for deceptively marketing free filing products and wrongfully deleting users’ in-progress tax data. Intuit, meanwhile, agreed to pay $141 million in restitution “for deceiving millions of low-income Americans into paying for tax services that should have been free,” according to the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James.