Research archive for GOOG

The return of Noam Shazeer to Google marks a major moment in the race to dominate AI. Shazeer was the co-author of the pivotal AI research paper "Attention is All You Need," but he left Google in 2021 after the company refused to release a chatbot he had developed.

Last month Alphabet reported an impressive set of numbers. Part of the earnings release revealed that Alphabet is investing an additional $5 billion into the driverless taxi company Waymo.

In a judgement delivered two weeks ago, a federal judge found that Google has a monopoly over the online search market. Now, news reports are surfacing that the US Department of Justice (DoJ) may be seeking to "split up" the company, to remedy the situation.

In a disappointing ruling last night, Judge Amit P. Mehta found Google guilty of violating antitrust laws by maintaining a monopoly in the search engine market. This was the first major antitrust victory against a tech giant since the 1990s Microsoft case.

Google Cloud has been growing steadily and is finally contributing some solid operating income. Take a look at the picture below. Up until the first quarter of 2023, the business was loss-making. In the latest quarter, it raked in $1.2 billion.

Sometimes, it is a tough day in the office. On Tuesday night, Google posted results that handily beat analyst exceptions on both revenue and profits. Disappointingly, the stock dropped 5% yesterday. The only letdown in Google's results was that YouTube's revenue grew slightly slower than expected, by 13% instead of 16%.

Alphabet is in advanced talks to buy cybersecurity startup Wiz for around $23 billion, which would be its largest acquisition ever. This acquisition comes amid intense antitrust scrutiny on Alphabet and aims to boost its cloud computing efforts, where it lags behind competitors.

You can now take driverless taxi rides in San Francisco with Waymo. The company, which is part of the Google group, has a fleet of self-driving white Jaguars (see below).

According to App Economy Insights, YouTube is still the king of streaming in the US. The best thing about their model is that they get most of their content for free.

Recently revealed court records from the ongoing antitrust lawsuit against Google unveiled some intriguing details. Google's parent company, Alphabet, shelled out a hefty $20 billion to Apple in 2022 to secure its position as the default search engine on iPhones.

Yesterday, in 2005, the first ever YouTube video was uploaded. It is called "Me at the zoo" and has over 317 million views. Don't go watch it, there is nothing special about it other than being a historical milestone. The video hosting site founded by former PayPal employees (pictured below) was snapped up very quickly by Google just 20 months later for $1.65 billion.

Would you pay for search? Google is considering charging money for its AI-powered search engine. Historically the service has been subsidised by advertising but because the back-end AI expertise is proving to be quite expensive, Google thinks a paywall might be the answer.

Google parent Alphabet is reportedly contemplating acquiring online marketing software company Hubspot. Hubspot is currently valued at $34 billion, such a move would mark Google's largest acquisition to date, far surpassing its previous purchases of Motorola for $12.5 billion in 2011 and cybersecurity firm Mandiant for $5.4 billion in 2022.

During the recent Google results coverage, I mentioned how AI is helping advertisers improve their conversion rates. Two weeks ago, Google announced the expansion of Gemini (their most capable AI model) into Google Ads. Beta access is now available in the US and UK and will be rolled out to global English-language advertisers over the coming weeks.

On Tuesday night Google released Q4 earnings. Revenues were up by 13%, its fastest sales growth since early 2022. Earnings also came in ahead of consensus due to better margins, while shares in issue declined by 2.5% year over year thanks to share buybacks. This business is in fantastic financial shape. They have net cash of $100bn and quarterly free cash flow of around $18bn. Lovely.