The parent companies of Google, Alphabet, and Microsoft, the Big Tech titans, announced their quarterly results on January 30. Among the highlights were advancements in cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI). The tech industry’s most talked-about topic last year was artificial intelligence (AI), whose global market is expected to reach $196.6 billion by 2023.With the release of their own sophisticated chatbots in 2023, Microsoft and Google were two of the industry leaders in AI development.At the end of the year, Microsoft’s sales increased, and a big part of it was its AI products.The company’s revenue increased to almost $60 billion in December, up 18% on an annual basis from September to December, according to the article.
In the Q4 earnings call Satya Nadella, the chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft, commented on Microsoft’s AI developments saying, “We’ve moved from talking about AI to applying AI at scale. By infusing AI across every layer of our tech stack, we’re winning new customers and helping drive new benefits and productivity gains across every sector.”
With a $3 trillion valuation, Microsoft surpassed Apple to become the most valuable public business in the world, according to these year-end data.
In addition to its AI products, Microsoft saw a 30% year-over-year increase in sales of Azure, its cloud computing service—a better outcome than industry observers had anticipated.The company’s Q4 total earnings of $21.9 billion represented a 33% year-over-year increase in earnings.Microsoft released the pro edition of its AI chatbot Copilot in 2024; this version comes with Office connectivity and the ability to build bespoke GPTs.But along with OpenAI, it also started the new year embroiled in a significant copyright case against the New York Times.
Alphabet similarly leaned on its AI integrations as a key factor in its Q4 success. The CEO of the company Sundar Pichai said he’s pleased with the strength of Google Search, and growth from YouTube and Cloud. “Each of these is already benefiting from our AI investments and innovation. As we enter the Gemini era, the best is yet to come.”
For the fourth quarter, it recorded consolidated revenue of $86 billion, up 13% from the previous year.Alphabet is dedicated to “durably re-engineering our cost base” in order to invest and support new growth possibilities, according to Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer.In order to meet its lofty targets in a number of areas, including artificial intelligence, Google has already announced plans to reduce employment.The corporation fired off 182,381 workers worldwide by September 2023 after announcing a 6% reduction in its global workforce in January 2023.However, Google kicked off the year by releasing “Lumiere,” a new realistic AI text-to-video generator that turns text and images into realistic AI-generated videos with on-demand editing features. Lumiere employs a time-space diffusion model to achieve this.