Google will continue to make meaningful investments in AI: Pichai

NEW DELHI: As Google expands access to its new artificial intelligence (AI) services, the company will continue to make meaningful investments in support of its AI efforts, re-engineering our cost base in order to help create capacity for these investments in support of long-term sustainable financial value, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said.

Pichai said that it is all part of the focus on making AI more helpful for everyone, like the Search Generative Experience (SGE) which is our experiment to bring Generative AI capabilities into Search.

“We have learned a lot from people trying it, and we have added new capabilities, like incorporating videos and images into responses and generating imagery. We’ve also made it easier to understand and debug generated code. Direct user feedback has been positive with strong growth and adoption,” he said during the company’s Q3 earnings call.

In August, Google opened up availability to India and Japan with more countries and languages to come. “With Generative AI applied to Search, we can serve a wider range of information needs and answer new types of questions, including those that benefit from multiple perspectives,” Pichai noted.

He said that ads will continue to play an important role in this new Search experience.

“People are finding ads helpful here as they provide useful options to take action and connect with businesses. We’ll experiment with new formats native to SGE that use Generative AI to create relevant high-quality ads customised to every step of the Search journey,” the Google CEO added.

For Q3, Alphabet’s consolidated revenues were $76.7 billion, up 11 per cent in both reported and constant currency

Search remained largest contributor to revenue growth

In terms of expenses, total cost of revenues was $33.2 billion, up 7 per cent, primarily reflecting other cost of revenues of $20.6 billion, which was up 6 per cent

YouTube advertising revenues of $8 billion were up 12 per cent, driven by both brand advertising and direct response

Boxn Google’s AI chatbot Bard can now integrate with Google apps and services, showing relevant information from Workspace, Maps, YouTube, and Google Flights and Hotels