2025-04-30
NEW: Pichai is testifying in the DOJ's search remedies antitrust case today. Here's my and Leah Nylen's first take. The Google CEO called the DOJ's proposed remedies a “de facto” spinoff of search. https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Bloomberg
US v. Google: Sundar Pichai says the DOJ's proposal to share Google search data with rivals amounts to a “de facto” spinoff of Google's search engine and its IP
- Alphabet CEO testifies as part of Justice Department lawsuit — Rivals could reverse-engineer ‘every aspect of our technology’
2025-04-25
New: a fun lil earnings scoop 🚨 There was an $8B increase in profit in Alphabet's latest report that was just nagging and nagging at me. The accounting didn't make sense. Finally got to the bottom of it: the boost came from unrealized gains from a 2015 investment in SpaceX. [image]
Alphabet
Alphabet reports Q1 revenue up 12% YoY to $90.2B, net income up 46% to $34.54B, Services revenue up 10% to $77.3B, and Other Bets revenue down 9% to $450M
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - April 24, 2025 - Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG, GOOGL) today announced financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2025.
New: a fun lil earnings scoop 🚨 There was an $8B increase in profit in Alphabet's latest report that was just nagging and nagging at me. The accounting didn't make sense. Finally got to the bottom of it: the boost came from unrealized gains from a 2015 investment in SpaceX. [image]
Bloomberg
Source: Alphabet's Q1 profit was boosted by $8B in unrealized gains from an investment in SpaceX; Alphabet has been a major SpaceX investor since at least 2015
Davey Alba / Bloomberg :
2024-07-31
Google, it appears, has a long way to go before it gains the trust of the public and medical practitioners that it needs to truly transform healthcare. As @sarahbmyers told me, the company feels a lot of pressure to find its place in the ecosystem and to try to turn a profit. [image]
Bloomberg
Sources including frontline health care workers say their testing of Google's AI-powered nurse handoff tool has left questions about its consistency and quality
We got exclusive access to trials that Google's healthcare partners are running at a Florida HCA hospital, in which nurses & ER doctors are using Google's generative AI health tech for medical use cases. https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Bloomberg
Sources including frontline health care workers say their testing of Google's AI-powered nurse handoff tool has left questions about its consistency and quality
NEW with @ikeswetlitz: Google's parent company spent billions on failed health projects. Will healthcare AI be its saving grace? https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Bloomberg
Sources including frontline health care workers say their testing of Google's AI-powered nurse handoff tool has left questions about its consistency and quality
So far, frontline health care workers say the technology is still lacking. In both trials that we observed, the AI missed crucial details for accurate health reports, including some that could potentially be life-threatening. https://www.bloomberg.com/... [image]
Bloomberg
Sources including frontline health care workers say their testing of Google's AI-powered nurse handoff tool has left questions about its consistency and quality
2024-05-21
Love this story about X—the Alphabet company, not ex-Twitter—and the end of its unrestrained invention (and unrestrained spending). Feat Astro Teller, Sebastian Thrun, Andrew Ng, Ruth Porat, and many more current & former Google VIPs! From @byjulialove https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Bloomberg
A profile of Alphabet's moonshot X lab, which is carving out a path to spin off projects as independent startups, after years of debate and experimentation
more of a focus on financial success these days, plus Google looks more like a conservative incumbent than out-of-the-box innovator. https://www.bloomberg.com/... #Google Max Chafk...
2024-05-15
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has taken the stage at #GoogleIO for the first time. He introduces Gemini 1.5 Flash, which Google says is the fastest AI model available through its API, lighter weight than 1.5 Pro but still adept enough for high-frequency tasks [image]
Engadget
Google announces Gemini 1.5 Flash, which is more lightweight and cheaper than Gemini Pro, but has the same multimodal capabilities and 1M-token context window
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has taken the stage at #GoogleIO for the first time. He introduces Gemini 1.5 Flash, which Google says is the fastest AI model available through its API, lighter weight than 1.5 Pro but still adept enough for high-frequency tasks [image]
TechCrunch
Google announces a private preview of a new Gemini 1.5 Pro version that can take in up to 2M tokens, twice its predecessor and rivals like Anthropic's Claude 3
Gemini, Google's family of generative AI models, can now analyze longer documents, codebases, videos and audio recordings than before.
2024-05-04
Laughing in the courtroom as DOJ flashes a slide that only says, “This is wrong” while discussing its allegation that Google intentionally destroyed communications in the midst of a litigation hold as the Justice Dept mounted its antitrust challenge against it
New York Times
Google employees have mostly ignored the DOJ's antitrust case, and some expect only small business tweaks and some fines; closing arguments concluded on May 3
Nico Grant / New York Times :
DOJ lawyer Kenneth Dintzer: “Google games out everything, they moneyball everything.” Says Google acted in a way where “the risk of doing this was less than the risk of being caught” - and Google will do it again, he says
New York Times
Google employees have mostly ignored the DOJ's antitrust case, and some expect only small business tweaks and some fines; closing arguments concluded on May 3
Nico Grant / New York Times :
2024-04-19
NEW w/ @byJuliaLove: We spoke to workers who were involved in Project Nimbus protests at several Google campuses on Tuesday. On Wednesday evening, 28 workers learned that they had been fired by the company https://www.bloomberg.com/... [image]
New York Post
Google fires 28 employees over their participation in a 10-hour sit-in at the company's New York and Sunnyvale offices to protest its business ties with Israel
https://medium.com/... X: Dr. Ks / @katejsim : Terminated worker here. Listen when employers tell you exactly who they are McCarthyism is alive and well. Look how terrified they ar...
@byJuliaLove One detail that might fly under the radar but that I find really striking: some workers involved in the protests rallied or passed out flyers outside, and never went into the office buildings. Google still identified them somehow and fired them, employees tell us. [image]
New York Post
Google fires 28 employees over their participation in a 10-hour sit-in at the company's New York and Sunnyvale offices to protest its business ties with Israel
https://medium.com/... X: Dr. Ks / @katejsim : Terminated worker here. Listen when employers tell you exactly who they are McCarthyism is alive and well. Look how terrified they ar...
2024-04-18
@byJuliaLove One detail that might fly under the radar but that I find really striking: some workers involved in the protests rallied or passed out flyers outside, and never went into the office buildings. Google still identified them somehow and fired them, employees tell us. [image]
New York Post
Google fires 28 employees over their participation in a 10-hour sit-in at the company's New York and Sunnyvale offices to protest its business ties with Israel
Google has fired 28 employees over their participation in a 10-hour sit-in at the search giant's offices in New York and Sunnyvale …
NEW w/ @byJuliaLove: We spoke to workers who were involved in Project Nimbus protests at several Google campuses on Tuesday. On Wednesday evening, 28 workers learned that they had been fired by the company https://www.bloomberg.com/... [image]
New York Post
Google fires 28 employees over their participation in a 10-hour sit-in at the company's New York and Sunnyvale offices to protest its business ties with Israel
Google has fired 28 employees over their participation in a 10-hour sit-in at the search giant's offices in New York and Sunnyvale …
2024-03-08
NEW with @LeonYin @Leonardonclt: Ever since the advent of ChatGPT in late 2022, there's been so much excitement for generative AI across industries. We wanted to ask—is there a risk of racial bias in generative AI being used for hiring and recruitment? https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Bloomberg
Tests show GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 systematically produce biases that disadvantage protected groups, based on their names, when screening and ranking job candidates
Recruiters are eager to use generative AI, but a Bloomberg experiment found bias against job candidates based on their names alone
2023-12-21
LAION-5B was released in 2022 and underpins multiple image-to-text AI models, the most popular of which is Stable Diffusion. But rumors about the dataset including CSAM have circulated in online forums and on social media for months https://www.bloomberg.com/... [image]
Bloomberg
Stanford researchers: LAION-5B, a dataset of 5B+ images used by Stability AI and others, contains 1,008+ instances of CSAM, possibly helping AI to generate CSAM
most prominently, Stable Diffusion 1.5—to see to what degree CSAM itself might be present in the training data. https://purl.stanford.edu/... Alex Stamos / @alex.stamos : Lots of p...
2023-12-20
LAION-5B was released in 2022 and underpins multiple image-to-text AI models, the most popular of which is Stable Diffusion. But rumors about the dataset including CSAM have circulated in online forums and on social media for months https://www.bloomberg.com/... [image]
Bloomberg
Stanford researchers: LAION-5B, a dataset of 5B images used by Stability AI and others, contains 1,008 instances of CSAM, possibly helping to create AI CSAM
The dataset has been used to build popular AI image generators, including Stable Diffusion. — A massive public dataset used …
2023-12-15
New: Three months after @byJuliaLove and I published our investigation into reverse warrants served to Google by police, the company says it is ending its ability to respond to geofence warrants. https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Forbes
Google confirms that it will no longer respond to geofence warrants after making changes to the way Maps stores users' location data
“Geofence warrants,” which allow law enforcement to get location data across a wide area, have become commonplace in recent years.