#Google

Wednesday, 4 November

Tech 4 November, 21:52

Alphabet loses $500 billion in market value as AI spending hits profit

Shares in Google's parent fell by double digits on October 28-29 after quarterly net profit slid 25% to $26.2 billion, The Guardian reported. Spending on datacentres and AI chips more than doubled to $51.4 billion.

Google owner Alphabet lost about $500 billion in stock market value after its quarterly results disappointed Wall Street, The Guardian and Semafor reported. The shares fell by double digits on the evening of October 28 and kept falling in trading on October 29. Before the drop, the tech giant was worth $4 trillion. AFP reported that Google dragged down Wall Street stocks that day. Net profit for July to September fell 25% from a year earlier to $26.2 billion, or $2.12 a share, The Guardian reported. That was well below analysts' forecasts. Alphabet booked an $8.7 billion loss on equity investments, which it blamed on its stake in SpaceX. Revenue rose 25% to $127.6 billion, slightly below the roughly $128 billion analysts expected. Advertising was the weak spot. Ad revenue grew 11% to $82 billion, short of expectations. Search revenue rose 12% to $63.4 billion, slowing from 17% growth in the previous quarter. YouTube ad revenue grew 9% to $11.2 billion. Google Cloud was the bright spot. Its revenue jumped 103% to $30.7 billion, helped by sales of Google's own AI chips, known as TPUs. Spending is what worried investors.…

EU court adviser: Google’s Gemini may breach publishers’ copyright

An adviser to the EU's top court said on Tuesday that Google's Gemini may infringe press publishers' rights when it reuses their articles to answer queries. Hungarian publisher Like Company brought the case, and a ruling is due in the coming months.

Google suffered a setback at Europe's highest court on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advises the Court of Justice of the European Union. He said Gemini's use of publishers' articles to answer user queries may breach copyright rules. The case pits Hungarian website operator Like Company against Google's AI chatbot. Szpunar said a publisher's rights may be infringed "in certain circumstances" when an AI chatbot pulls an article from a press website, reuses it and passes the answer to a user. He said this applies in two cases. The first is when chatbots unlawfully get around paywalls or other technical barriers. The second is when they reuse "the form of expression of that publication in a recognisable manner". He said copyright does not cover the "mere facts" in news stories, only the way they are written. He also said that using copyrighted material to train large language models is "freely permitted under the text and data mining exception". He found no evidence that Google had used the Hungarian publisher's articles to train Gemini. His opinion is not binding. However, the Luxembourg-based court follows most of its advisers' opinions. It will rule in the coming months. According to Reuters, a…