Google‘s Bard announcement last week was meant to show that the company has similar technology as the popular ChatGPT chatbot, even though it still has ways to go before becoming product-ready, Alphabet Chairman John Hennessy said Monday.
“I think Google was hesitant to productize this because it didn’t think it was really ready for a product yet, but, I think, as a demonstration vehicle, it’s a great piece of technology,” said Hennessy, who has been the chairman of the Google parent company since 2018. He went on to say that he thinks generative artificial intelligence is still one to two years away from being a truly useful tool for the broader public.
Hennessy was speaking at a summit held by venture firm Celesta Capital in Mountain View, California. Hennessy has a long history in tech, including as a professor, researcher and company founder, and he also served as the president of Stanford University from 2000 to 2016.
Hennessy, who spoke on key trends for 2023, briefly touched on Google being caught in the sudden onrush of interest in ChatGPT and generative AI.
Last week, the company launched its response to ChatGPT in a conversation technology it is calling Bard. However, the announcement had the appearance of being rushed to match Microsoft’s inclusion of ChatGPT technology into its search engine, Bing, and investors punished Alphabet stock, sending it down 9% for the day.
Hennessy said Google was slow to roll out its ChatGPT competitor in part because it’s still giving wrong answers. Google is among the most-used consumer products, and entities like YouTube and Search have sometimes provided inaccurate information in the past.
That past, it seems, is inspiring caution at the company.
“You don’t want to put a system out that either says wrong things or sometimes says toxic things,” Hennessy said during the conference, echoing CEO Sundar Pichai’s response in December when employees asked if the company was falling behind ChatGPT. The tech industry has to be “a little more careful about the situation we create in civil society,” he acknowledged.
“I think these models are still in the early days — figuring out how to bring them into a product stream and do it in a way that’s sensitive to correctness, as well as issues like toxicity,” Hennessey told CNBC on Monday. “I think the industry is struggling with that.”
He added, “I don’t think Vint anticipated that people would use the internet to do evil things,” referring to Google executive Vint Cerf, who was one of the early developers of the internet’s underlying technology.
“I’m from the age where, if you spam somebody, you were a social pariah. Now, I get 10 spam messages for every real message, so the world has changed, and we’ve got to think about what role technology has in ensuring that we have a functioning democracy, we have people who can live together and work together, we don’t have hatred or some of these other toxic things. I think we really do need to work on that.”
Hennessy added that he’s been impressed with ChatGPT’s abilities, and that it is moving faster than he anticipated.
“I’m impressed with two things — first of all the quality of the natural language ability both to interpret a query but also to respond to something — the generative function. I’m impressed that it manages to, at least at a fairly superficial level, get a lot of things right.”
He declined to comment specifically on the public’s reaction to Google’s Bard announcement last week.
Hennessy later said it’s a good time for startups in Silicon Valley that can benefit from recruiting talent from Big Tech during the current cycle of layoffs.
“Startups have such an important role to play in the valley,” he said. “One of the great things about the valley is you cannot rest on your laurels because some new startup will come along and really give you a run for your money.”
Vice Chair and President at Microsoft, Brad Smith, participates in the first day of Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, on November 12, 2024. The largest technology conference in the world this year has 71,528 attendees from 153 countries and 3,050 companies, with AI emerging as the most represented industry. (Photo by Rita Franca/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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Microsoft plans to spend $80 billion in fiscal 2025 on the construction of data centers that can handle artificial intelligence workloads, the company said in a Friday blog post.
Over half of the expected AI infrastructure spending will take place in the U.S., Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith wrote. Microsoft’s 2025 fiscal year ends in June.
“Today, the United States leads the global AI race thanks to the investment of private capital and innovations by American companies of all sizes, from dynamic start-ups to well-established enterprises,” Smith said. “At Microsoft, we’ve seen this firsthand through our partnership with OpenAI, from rising firms such as Anthropic and xAI, and our own AI-enabled software platforms and applications.”
Several top-tier technology companies are rushing to spend billions on Nvidia graphics processing units for training and running AI models. The fast spread of OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant, which launched in late 2022, kicked off the AI race for companies to deliver their own generative AI capabilities. Having invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, Microsoft provides cloud infrastructure to the startup and has incorporated its models into Windows, Teams and other products.
Microsoft reported $20 billion in capital expenditures and assets acquired under finance leases worldwide, with $14.9 billion spent on property and equipment, in the first quarter of fiscal 2025. Capital expenditures will increase sequentially in the fiscal second quarter, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said in October.
The company’s revenue from Azure and other cloud services grew 33% year over year, with 12 percentage points of that growth stemming from AI services.
Smith called on President-elect Donald Trump‘s incoming administration to protect the country’s leadership in AI through education and the promotion of U.S. AI technologies abroad.
“China is starting to offer developing countries subsidized access to scarce chips, and it’s promising to build local AI data centers,” Smith wrote. “The Chinese wisely recognize that if a country standardizes on China’s AI platform, it likely will continue to rely on that platform in the future.”
He added, “The best response for the United States is not to complain about the competition but to ensure we win the race ahead. This will require that we move quickly and effectively to promote American AI as a superior alternative.”
An Apple flagship store in Shanghai, China, October 15, 2024.
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Sales of foreign phone brands in China plunged in November, according to official data released Friday, underscoring further pressure on Apple, the biggest international handset vendor in the country.
In November, foreign mobile phone shipments in China stood at 3.04 million units, according to CNBC calculations based on data from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, or CAICT.
That’s a fall of 47.4% from November 2023, and a 51% drop from October last year.
CAICT does not break down figures for individual brands, however Apple accounts for the majority of foreign mobile phone shipments in China with competitors like Samsung forming only a tiny part of the market.
The figures highlight the mounting pressure Apple is under in the world’s largest smartphone market as it battles rising competition from domestic brands.
Apple is hoping its iPhone 16 series, which was released in September, will help the company regain momentum in China, with the Cupertino, California, tech giant promising a host of new artificial intelligence features via its Apple Intelligence software.
Facebook vice president of global public policy Joel Kaplan and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg leave the Elysee Presidential Palace after a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron on May 23, 2018 in Paris, France.
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Facebook parent Meta is replacing President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg with Joel Kaplan, the company’s current policy vice president and a former Republican party staffer.
The shake up comes three weeks before President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration, and it’s the latest sign of how tech companies are positioning themselves for a new administration in Washington.
Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister, said he is stepping down, citing the new year as the right time to move on. He’ll be replaced by Kaplan, who will take on the title of Chief Global Affairs Officer.
Kaplan was a staffer under former President George W. Bush, and he appeared at the NYSE with Vice President-elect J.D. Vance and Trump in December. He also attended Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in 2018 as a personal friend, causing a controversy for the social media company.
“I will look forward to spending a few months handing over the reins — and to representing the company at a number of international gatherings in Q1 of this year,” Clegg wrote in a memo to his staff that he shared on Facebook on Thursday.
Clegg joined the company in 2018 after a career in British politics with the Liberal Democrats party, and he helped Meta navigate incredible scrutiny, especially over the company’s influence on elections and its efforts to control harmful content. Clegg also helped steer the company through the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook shared user data with third-party political consultants. He also represented the company in Washington and London, frequently at panels for artificial intelligence and at congressional hearings.
“My time at the company coincided with a significant resetting of the relationship between ‘big tech’ and the societal pressures manifested in new laws, institutions and norms affecting the sector,” Clegg wrote.
In his note, Clegg said that former Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin would replace Kaplan as Meta’s vice president of global policy. He mentioned that Kaplan would work closely with David Ginsburg, the company’s vice president of global communications and public affairs.
“Nick: I’m grateful for everything you’ve done for Meta and the world these past seven years,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. You “built a strong team to carry this work forward. I’m excited for Joel to step into this role next given his deep experience and insight leading our policy work for many years.”