This week, I take a look at the surprisingly strong state of Google, Meta gets a new chief AI researcher, and more. If you haven’t already, be sure to check out this week’s Decoder episode about deepfakes and where they are headed.
Also, do you use an AI coding tool like Cursor or GitHub Copilot? I’d love to know what works and what doesn’t…
“I think we are doing very well through this moment”
After spending time with Google executives during the company’s I/O conference in May, it was clear that they were feeling confident. Now, I’m beginning to see why.
ChatGPT is not making Google Search obsolete. If anything, AI is making Google stronger than before.
During Google’s earnings call this week, CEO Sundar Pichai announced that AI Overviews in search results “are now driving over 10-percent more queries globally for the types of queries that show them, and this growth continues to increase over time.” Put simply, when Google works like ChatGPT, people use it more. Pichai noted that this is particularly true for younger people, a demographic that the 10-blue-links version of Google had been losing relevance with for a long time.
ChatGPT doesn’t appear to be curbing the growth of the Gemini app, either. Pichai said that daily prompts to Gemini increased by over 50 percent from the previous quarter. Gemini now has more than 450 million monthly users, up from 350 million in March. Google processed nearly a quadrillion AI tokens across all its products last month, which is more than double the number it processed in May.
Another telling sign of confidence has been Google’s reaction to the AI talent wars. “I look at both our retention metrics as well as the new talent coming in, and both are healthy,” Pichai said on the earnings call. “I do know individual cases can make headlines. But when we look at numbers deeply, I think we are doing very well through this moment.”
While Mark Zuckerberg has managed to poach talented researchers from DeepMind, my sources say that Pichai and Demis Hassabis have been resistant to bidding wars and amenable to letting most people go. Contrast this with the mood at OpenAI, where research chief Mark Chen compared Meta’s poaching to the feeling of a home invasion.
There’s an industry-wide belief that DeepMind’s bench is deep enough to withstand defections and that the company can quickly make reverse acquihire moves, such as its recent Windsurf deal, as more AI startups seek refuge from the money-intensive game that only Big Tech seems capable of truly playing.
... continue reading