The internet giant said in January it would cut 12,000 people from its payroll, or 6% of its global workforce. Alphabet had 190,711 employees as of March 31, compared with 190,234 at the end of last year. The company’s layoffs did not come into effect until the end of last month.
Meanwhile, Google’s search engine appears threatened by the wave of chatbots that has captured the public’s imagination. In particular, tools from Microsoft and OpenAI (maker of the popular ChatGPT chatbot) have begun to test Google’s mettle.
In March, Google released a chatbot called Bard to mixed reviews, but the company doesn’t generate revenue from the tool. The New York Times reported that Google will incorporate conversational AI capabilities into its flagship search engine in May and has begun work on a new, more personalized search engine designed to take advantage of advances in AI.
Last week, Alphabet consolidated its main AI teams into one division, google deep thinking, in order to make faster progress in this field. The move merges London-based artificial intelligence lab DeepMind with Google Brain, the company’s research arm. DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis took over the group. Jeff Dean is Google’s top research executive and previously oversaw Google Brain, a company he co-founded.
On Tuesday’s earnings call, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is making “good progress” in artificial intelligence and aligns it with the company’s transition from desktop to mobile computing more than a decade ago. compared.
