Big Tech’s buzzword season

The one thing that was certain going into this week’s Big Tech earnings season is that A.I. would be at the center of the show. And indeed, while the financial results varied, with Meta’s and Alphabet’s advertising revenues coming in much stronger than expected and Snap’s forecast surprising on the downside, mentions of artificial intelligence rang through all the earnings calls, almost like a common religious chant. 

Executives at Intel, Microsoft, and Meta all invoked the magic word dozens of times. At Microsoft, which helped kick off the generative A.I. craze with its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, talk of A.I. outpaced even references to the cloud, the foundation of CEO Satya Nadella’s turnaround. 

But the winner of the A.I. contest was Alphabet, whose executives managed to say A.I. 82 times during the 60-minute call, by my count. Search, by contrast, which represents roughly 60% of Alphabet’s business, was mentioned a relatively low 30 times. 

Obviously, there’s only so much you can conclude about a company’s business and its priorities from tabulating the buzzwords of its leadership team. And the results can be affected by the questions analysts choose to ask company executives on the conference calls. Still, it’s an interesting way to get a sense of the zeitgeist at play at different companies—and it’s fun. 

At Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned the word “efficiency” eight times, in keeping with his so-called Year of Efficiency. The metaverse—the virtual world that the company renamed itself for—came up 11 times during the call, compared to 63 A.I. mentions.  

Social, as in the social networking that has helped Facebook attain 3 billion users? Just three mentions by Meta executives on Wednesday’s earnings call. That’s the same number of times that Microsoft executives referred to Activision, the video game company it’s acquiring for $69 billion. When it closes, it will be the largest deal in Microsoft’s nearly five-decade history.

More news below.

Alexei Oreskovic

NEWSWORTHY

Online safety for kids. The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and Children and Teens Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) were both advanced in the Senate yesterday, suggesting the congressional push to fight a growing young people’s mental health crisis may actually bear fruit. Despite some recent changes, The Verge notes that digital rights groups remain concerned that KOSA will effectively lead to more online surveillance, to make sure its new age restrictions are respected.

Intel reprieve. Happy days for Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who has managed to bring the chipmaker back into profitability—$1.5 billion in the last quarter, from $12.9 billion in revenues. As Reuters reports, this surprise for Wall Street comes largely thanks to a slowdown in the decline of PC shipments. "Intel did outperform almost exclusively on the strength of desktop sales which rebounded from a near-record low last quarter,” said Charter Equity Research’s Edward Snyder. 

A.I. safety issues. Researchers have demonstrated ways to circumvent the “guardrails” that A.I. companies are building into their models. According to the New York Times, the Carnegie Mellon University and Center for A.I. Safety researchers were able to get not only open-source chatbots, but also the closed likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, to generate bomb recipes and disinformation. There is apparently no systematic way of thwarting such attacks.

ON OUR FEED

“We were under pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more…We shouldn’t have done it.”

—An unnamed Facebook executive explaining to global affairs chief Nick Clegg why the platform removed content claiming that COVID was man-made, according to a Wall Street Journal report on internal company communications.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Google U.K. boss says you can’t trust its chatbot Bard for accurate information, by Prarthana Prakash

Threads can become the ‘purest form’ of social media as long as Meta and Mark Zuckerberg agree to one thing, says tech exec, by Paolo Confino

‘It’s not simple’: Researchers tweaked Facebook’s algorithms to see if they could fix America’s political polarization. They failed, by Associated Press

McDonald’s Grimace mascot helped boost sales over 11%—and the company has TikTokers faking their brutal deaths to thank, by Paige Hagy

Generative A.I. will upend the workforce, McKinsey says, forcing 12 million job switches and automating away 30% of hours worked in the U.S. economy by 2030, by Paolo Confino

A broken U.S. immigration system is helping foreign countries woo California’s tech founders. The Golden State’s new global talent program could reverse the trend, by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever

BEFORE YOU GO

Call of Duty worm alert. Malware has reportedly been spreading through hacked online lobbies in the venerable Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. As TechCrunch points out, malware has sometimes been distributed through trojanized game installers, but this is a worm spreading from player to player, which is unusual.

The report suggests Activision took the game’s multiplayer mode offline to investigate the issue. It’s not clear what the hackers behind the worm were trying to achieve.