Alphabet reports $34.5bn profit and revenue soars 48% in recent quarter as it plans a sharp increase in AI spending Google's parent company, Alphabet, beat Wall Street expectations on Wednesday, and is planning a sharp increase in capital spending in 2026 as it continues to invest deeply in AI infrastructure. Alphabet on Wednesday reported profit of $34.5bn in the recently ended quarter, as revenue from cloud computing soared 48%. In an earnings call, investors pressed Alphabet's chief executive, Sundar Pichai, on the significant increase. "We've been supply constrained, even as we've been ramping up our capacity. Obviously, our CapEx spend this year is an eye towards the future," Pichai said, in response.

Google's ultra-private CEO Sundar Pichai is showing me around Googleplex, its California headquarters. A walkway runs along the length of it, passing by a giant dinosaur skeleton, a beach volleyball pitch and dozens of Googlers lunching under the hazy November sun. But it's a laboratory, hidden away at the back of the campus behind some trees, that he is most excited to show me. This is where the invention that Google believes is its secret weapon is being developed. Known as a Tensor Processing Unit (or TPU), it looks like an unassuming little chip but, says Mr Pichai, it will one day power every AI query that goes through Google.

Don't blindly trust what AI tells you, says Google's Sundar Pichai People should not blindly trust everything AI tools tell them, the boss of Google's parent company Alphabet told the BBC. In an exclusive interview, chief executive Sundar Pichai said that AI models are prone to errors and urged people to use them alongside other tools. Mr Pichai said it highlighted the importance of having a rich information ecosystem, rather than solely relying on AI technology. This is why people also use Google search, and we have other products that are more grounded in providing accurate information. While AI tools were helpful if you want to creatively write something, Mr Pichai said people have to learn to use these tools for what they're good at, and not blindly trust everything they say.

Google boss warns'no company is going to be immune' if AI bubble bursts Every company would be affected if the AI bubble were to burst, the head of Google's parent firm Alphabet has told the BBC. Speaking exclusively to BBC News, Sundar Pichai said while the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) investment had been an extraordinary moment, there was some irrationality in the current AI boom. It comes amid fears in Silicon Valley and beyond of a bubble as the value of AI tech companies has soared in recent months and companies spend big on the burgeoning industry. Asked whether Google would be immune to the impact of the AI bubble bursting, Mr Pichai said the tech giant could weather that potential storm, but also issued a warning. I think no company is going to be immune, including us, he said.

Alphabet's Sundar Pichai said his company will keep expanding its engineering ranks at least into 2026, stressing human talent remains key even as Google's parent ramps up artificial intelligence investments. Speaking at the Bloomberg Tech conference in San Francisco, Pichai said he will continue to invest in engineering in the near future. U.S. tech leaders like Microsoft have trimmed more staff this year, reflecting in part the enormous investments needed to ensure leadership in AI. The firings have stoked fears about the technology replacing certain job functions. Google, itself, has conducted rounds of layoffs in recent years to free up resources.

Yes, Google's roster of consumer-facing products is the slickest on offer. The firm is bundling most of its multimodal models into its Gemini app, including the new Imagen 4 image generator and the new Veo 3 video generator. That means you can now access Google's full range of generative models via a single chatbot. It also announced Gemini Live, a feature that lets you share your phone's screen or your camera's view with the chatbot and ask it about what it can see. Those features were previously only seen in demos of Project Astra, a "universal AI assistant" that Google DeepMind is working on.

The apple blossoms are sprouting, the sun is finally rising before your alarm goes off, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai is wiping down the lenses of his Gemini-powered smart glasses. You know what that means: It's once again time for Google I/O. Google is going all out for its annual I/O developer conference, which begins on Tuesday, May 20. The event is taking place at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, just down the road from Google's headquarters. The keynote starts at 10 am PDT on Tuesday, and as usual, it will be livestreamed.

That was how long Google was giving Sissie Hsiao. A hundred days to build a ChatGPT rival. By the time Hsiao took on the project in December 2022, she had spent more than 16 years at the company. She led thousands of employees. Hsiao had seen her share of corporate crises--but nothing like the code red that had been brewing in the days since OpenAI, a small research lab, released its public experiment in artificial intelligence.

Among all the images of people cozying up to President Donald Trump at today's inauguration, one in particular will be worth remembering over the next four years. During the ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, you could see some of the most powerful men on the planet positioned immediately behind members of the Trump family on the dais. There's Tiffany, there's Eric, there are Ivanka and Don Jr., and then, smiling and clapping right alongside the family, there are the tech titans: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, Elon Musk, and Tim Cook. In visual proximity, they're as close to honorary Trumps as anyone could be. The power that each of these men represents may be rivaled by only the presidency itself.

The battle for AI supremacy is heating up. Almost exactly a week after OpenAI made its o1 model available to the public, Google today is offering a preview of its next-generation Gemini 2.0 model. In a blog post attributed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the company says 2.0 is its most capable model yet, with the algorithm offering native support for image and audio output. "It will enable us to build new AI agents that bring us closer to our vision of a universal assistant," says Pichai. Google is doing something different with Gemini 2.0.