AI helps Big Tech score big numbers
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The April-June quarter of 2025 proved stellar for the big technology pack: Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, with each company surpassing market expectations. Alphabet's revenue showed that AI-led search is boosting earnings instead of cannibalising.Meta outperformed estimates due to AI-powered ad optimisation and Zuckerberg's aggressive vision for personal superintelligence.Microsoft Azure cloud surpassed $75 billion in annual run rate for the first time, zooming the stock to $4 trillion valuation – a feat achieved hitherto by AI hardware titan Nvidia.Cumulative capital spending across these firms ranges between $331 billion and $377 billion, and consumes up to 40% of sales and 80% of operating cash flow at some companies.
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Indian Express
3 minutes ago
- Indian Express
So Long to Tech's Dream Job
When Rachel Grey started working at Google as a software engineer in 2007, it was a good time to be a Noogler, or what the search giant called new employees. At a two-week orientation at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, Grey discovered a utopia of perks. The company's cafeterias served steak and shrimp, kitchens were stocked with fresh juices, and gyms offered free workout classes. Workers received stock grants on top of their salaries, a 50% match on their retirement contributions and a Christmas bonus that came in the form of $1,000 tucked in an envelope. What also made an impression on Grey during orientation was that Google revealed how many machines were in its data centers. 'I saw how transparent things were in the company,' she said about the normally hush-hush information. Over the years, though, her experience changed as she became a software engineering manager. The Christmas bonus shrank. Employees were no longer provided a fire hose of corporate information. The company abandoned a pledge that its artificial intelligence would not be used for weapons. The budget for promotions dried up, pressuring Grey to lower performance ratings, which she said was 'stunningly painful.' In April, just shy of 18 years, the 48-year-old quit what was once her dream job. Life for workers at Silicon Valley's biggest tech companies is different. Very different. Gone are the days when Google, Apple, Meta and Netflix were the dream destinations for tech workers, offering fat salaries, lush corporate campuses and say-anything, do-anything cultures. Now the behemoth firms have aged into large bureaucracies. While many of them still provide free food and pay well, they have little compunction cutting jobs, ordering mandatory office attendance and clamping down on employee debate. It's the shut up and grind era, workers said. 'Tech could still be best in terms of free lunch and a high salary,' Grey said, but 'the level of fear has gone way up.' 'I suppose it's better to have lunch and be scared to death than to not have lunch and be scared to death, but I don't know if it's good for you to be there,' she added. A Google spokesperson said that many employees had been promoted and that the company had changed its performance management system to better reward high performers. The company has introduced policies meant to encourage employees to focus on their work while also staying true to Google's goals and culture, she added. As the tech companies became hulking entities with workforces larger than many towns — and costs to match — scrutiny increased, too. Meta, Google, Apple and others were driven to make changes as workers and the public questioned their power. The turning point came in 2022 and 2023, when Elon Musk bought Twitter (renamed X) and shed three-quarters of its employees, while Meta's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, cut thousands of jobs during what he called 'a year of efficiency.' Google and Amazon also conducted mass layoffs. Many of the companies blamed the pandemic for their overhiring during lockdowns as more people turned to digital services. Along the way, the companies became less tolerant of employee outspokenness. Bosses reasserted themselves after workers protested issues including sexual harassment in the workplace. With the job market flooded with qualified engineers, it became easier to replace those who criticized. 'This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,' Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, said in a blog post last year. Some would say the changes have simply aligned tech workers with the rest of corporate America, where employees are accustomed to fulfilling corporate priorities. But the shift in tech was compounded by the rise of generative artificial intelligence, which executives say has already made some jobs redundant. In January, Zuckerberg said he believed AI would replace some midlevel engineers this year. Musk went further, predicting last year that AI would eventually eliminate all jobs. 'The tide has definitely turned against tech workers,' said Catherine Bracy, the founder and chief executive of TechEquity, a nonprofit that pushes for economic inclusion in the industry. 'Companies have even more leverage to use against workers, and AI is supercharging that.' Liz Fong-Jones, the field chief technology officer at Honeycomb, a San Francisco company that helps engineers find and debug problems in their code, said AI's effect on jobs was overblown. But that could change five years from now, she cautioned. Tech workers could stop AI from taking hold, said Fong-Jones, a former Googler, adding, 'but we're all afraid enough to go along with training our own replacements.' For some tech workers, the change in the workplace was abrupt. Adam Treitler, 32, a human resources strategist who worked at Twitter's New York office before and after Musk's acquisition, said the company's moves under its new owner were startling. 'From the day before Elon to the day after Elon, it pivoted overnight from 'how do we improve HR management' to 'what are the fewest number of steps involved and the fewest number of people needed to pay our employees,' ' said Treitler, who joined Twitter in 2021 and left in January 2023. He now works for jewelry company Pandora. X did not respond to a request for comment. Others said the shift had played out more slowly. Ava Sazanami, a designer in her 40s in Seattle, joined Meta in 2022 to make tools to help users with their privacy settings. The mother of two said she had felt empowered to help solve some of the tech concerns that worried her as a parent. Meta also allowed a flexible schedule so she could accompany her children to appointments, and LGBTQ+-friendly policies made her feel welcome because she had gay family members, she said. But over time, Meta curtailed its family benefits, Sazanami said. In January, the company killed its diversity programs and social media policies against hate speech targeting LGBTQ+ people. A month later, she was laid off when Meta cut 5% of its workforce. 'We're seeing right now why tech needs unions,' said Sazanami, who is looking for a new job. 'The current culture has disempowered workers.' A Meta spokesperson declined to comment. In an earnings call in January, Zuckerberg said, 'We operate better as a leaner company.' Some workers are leaving big tech companies to join the AI fray. Jason Yuan, 28, started as a designer at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California, in 2021. It felt like a lucky break to work for a company that he revered for its design, he said. Yet after the AI boom arrived with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, Yuan said, he yearned to get involved. In 2023, he left Apple to start New Computer, a company that makes a personal companion chatbot. He hopes to work more speedily and make more money, as AI is likely to replace him in his lifetime, he said. 'We're reaching the end of our economic life span,' he said, adding, 'There's a feeling of, I have to make whatever I do now count.' Apple declined to comment. For Grey, Google's exhilarating early days seem like another lifetime. The work was not always easy, she said, but the company's culture made it easier to power through. One day, she recalled, she and her coworkers arrived to find Nerf guns on their desks. When a power outage hit, shutting down computers, they grabbed their Nerf guns and broke into a friendly fight. 'Google had such a glow about it then,' she said. 'There was an institutionally approved playfulness to it all. I loved that.' Now 'the future of the whole industry seems very shaky,' said Grey, who is taking time off from tech.
Indian Express
3 minutes ago
- Indian Express
OpenAI releases open-weight reasoning models optimised for running on laptops
OpenAI said on Tuesday it has released two open-weight language models that excel in advanced reasoning and are optimized to run on laptops with performance levels similar to its smaller proprietary reasoning models. An open-weight language model's trained parameters or weights are publicly accessible, which can be used by developers to analyze and fine-tune the model for specific tasks without requiring original training data. 'One of the things that is unique about open models is that people can run them locally. People can run them behind their own firewall, on their own infrastructure,' OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman said in a press briefing. Open-weight language models are different from open-source models, which provide access to the complete source code, training data and methodologies. Separately, Amazon announced OpenAI's open-weight models are now available on its Bedrock generative AI marketplace in Amazon Web Services. It marks the first time an OpenAI model has been offered on Bedrock, said Atul Deo, Bedrock's director of product. 'OpenAI has been developing great models and we believe that these models are going to be great open-source options, or open-weight model options for customers,' said Deo, in an interview. He declined to discuss any contractual arrangements between AWS and OpenAI. Amazon shares tumbled last week after the company reported slowing growth in its AWS unit, particularly compared with rivals. The landscape of open-weight and open-source AI models has been highly contested this year. For a time, Meta's Llama models were considered the best, but that changed earlier this year when China's DeepSeek released a powerful and cost-effective reasoning model, while Meta struggled to deliver Llama 4. The two new OpenAI models are the first open models OpenAI has released since GPT-2, which was released in 2019. OpenAI's larger model, gpt-oss-120b, can run on a single GPU, and the second, gpt-oss-20b, is small enough to run directly on a personal computer, the company said. OpenAI said the models have similar performance to its proprietary reasoning models called o3-mini and o4-mini, and especially excel at coding, competition math and health-related queries. The models were trained on a text-only dataset which in addition to general knowledge, focused on science, math and coding knowledge. OpenAI did not release benchmarks comparing the open-weight models to competitors' models such as the DeepSeek-R1 model. Microsoft-backed OpenAI, currently valued at $300 billion, is currently raising up to $40 billion in a new funding round led by Softbank Group.
The Hindu
3 minutes ago
- The Hindu
Meta says working to thwart WhatsApp scammers
Meta on Tuesday said it shut nearly seven million WhatsApp accounts linked to scammers in the first half of this year and is ramping up safeguards against such schemes. "Our team identified the accounts and disabled them before the criminal organizations that created them could use them," WhatsApp external affairs director Clair Deevy said. Often run by organised gangs, the scams range from bogus cryptocurrency investments to get-rich-quick pyramid schemes, WhatsApp executives said in a briefing. "There is always a catch and it should be a red flag for everyone: you have to pay upfront to get promised returns or earnings," Meta-owned WhatsApp said in a blog post. WhatsApp detected and banned more than 6.8 million accounts linked to scam centers, most of them in Southeast Asia, according to Meta. WhatsApp and Meta worked with OpenAI to disrupt a scam traced to Cambodia that used ChatGPT to generate text messages containing a link to a WhatsApp chat to hook victims, according to the tech firms. Meta on Tuesday began prompting WhatsApp users to be wary when added to unfamiliar chat groups by people they don't know. New "safety overviews" provide information about the group and tips on spotting scams, along with the option of making a quick exit. "We've all been there: someone you don't know attempting to message you, or add you to a group chat, promising low-risk investment opportunities or easy money, or saying you have an unpaid bill that's overdue," Meta said in a blog post. "The reality is, these are often scammers trying to prey on people's kindness, trust and willingness to help, or their fears that they could be in trouble if they don't send money fast."
