Yahoo Finance Tech Editor Dan Howley discusses the predominant mentions of AI development amongst tech earnings this week.
Video Transcript
- And let's get you up to speed on the tech sector, of course. Tech trading up nearly 1 and 1/2% over the last five days. You're looking at the Tech Select Sector SPDR Fund index. This comes on the heels of multiple strong earnings from the likes of Meta-- parent company of Facebook, Instagram, et cetera-- Alphabet, parent company of Google there, and Microsoft. One thing every report had in common-- big talk of AI. And Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley joins us with more. Dan?
DAN HOWLEY: That's right. AI really was king for this earnings season, at least so far. From Google-- parent, Alphabet-- Microsoft, and Meta, they all had something to say about AI. Amazon not so much. They only said it once in the opening statement from CEO Andy Jassy.
But when we look at how many times-- just rattling this off is-- it doesn't really give you a total understanding of what the calls had to say, but just giving you an idea. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, mentioned AI 34 times during his opening remarks for the call. That doesn't include the question-and-answer part. Satya Nadella-- 31 times. And Mark Zuckerberg during his own call-- 22 times.
This is just showing how important the AI space is to these companies. Now, we obviously have this kind of inkling that Microsoft is in the lead at this point because of its partnership with OpenAI. Google really trying to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, we basically helped create the technology that OpenAI uses, this transformer technology. We did the papers on it, the research.
And then Meta is saying, hey, the Metaverse is cool and all. We're still going to invest in that. But AI is something that we really want to talk about. They jumped in to start off discussions with Mark Zuckerberg pointing towards the company's layoffs, but then right away dove into AI and how the company's innovating there and working on it and has been using it and will continue to use it. And it's going to help the Metaverse and vice versa. So AI-- so far, at least-- the leading piece of conversation. We still have big names like Apple and Nvidia coming.
JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, we do. I mean, and there's conversation, and then there's reality, right? AI isn't that integrated into these businesses, right? And so the folks you're talking to and as you try to piece through these earnings, how are you sort of framing it, the whole AI conversation?
DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, it's interesting, right? Because, I mean, the way that the investors seem to be reacting and the market and analysts, to a degree, is as if AI did not exist before this. You use AI every day. It's in your weather app. It's in your messaging apps whenever-- I've said this before-- you accidentally type duck. That's AI, right? That is predictive text. That's based on AI.
ChatGPT is more or less a souped up version of that, right? So it's not as though this technology is incredibly new. It's being implemented in ways that are exciting and new. Microsoft basically just laying it across its entire stack. Google working on that as well. Meta trying to figure out where they kind of fit in this conversation exactly. They were talking about chat bots. It's kind of been there, done that before, but let's see where generative AI can bring us.
So I do think that it is part hype, part actual product. But we need to see where that actual product goes and how beneficial these are. Even Sam Altman, who heads up OpenAI, says he doesn't even know what he's really playing with at this point.
JULIE HYMAN: Hmm. Well, Dan, you and I both know that duck is not what I typed. And so--
DAN HOWLEY: I did not mean to type that.
JULIE HYMAN: --maybe that'll be a measure of the next phase of AI if it does not autocorrect me, when I type things, to duck. Thank you so much, Dan Howley. Appreciate it.