Amazon optimizes delivery network for speedier delivery, lower costs Amazon this week said it was offering U.S. customers $10 to pick up a purchase rather than have it shipped to a home address. As the company tightens its belt after a period of explosive growth, it has made numerous moves to reduce delivery-related costs across the company. .
Google’s Sundar Pichai talks Search, AI, and dancing with Microsoft AI is one of the deepest platform shifts ever, says Google’s CEO, and he’s not worried about being first........ Google, which invented a lot of the core technology behind the current AI moment. The company is very quick to point out that the “T” in ChatGPT stands for transformer, the large language model technology first invented at Google, but OpenAI and others have been first to market with generative AI products, and OpenAI has partnered with Microsoft on a new version of Bing that feels like the first real competitor to Google Search in a long time ............ With AI, I feel like this is our seventh year as an AI-first company. I feel we are AI native. Part of the reason yesterday you saw all this... Pretty much most teams at Google intuitively understand what it is to use AI in our products. ........... We’ve invested so deeply in AI for a while, and we have clarity of not just building AI in our products, clearly providing it to the rest of the world. And we have planned for that from the very beginning. So it makes me excited about this moment. ........... The platform shift that is occurring, that everyone can see, was not kicked off by Google. It was kicked off by OpenAI and ChatGPT and Microsoft, to some extent. And it’s because you were being responsible; you were being cautious. ........... Google wasn’t even there when the internet shift happened. So I think there is this notion that one of the deepest platform shifts on day one is what sets it. I just don’t subscribe to that. ......... Google wasn’t even there when the internet shift happened. So I think there is this notion that one of the deepest platform shifts on day one is what sets it. I just don’t subscribe to that. ......... “I have a lot of respect for Sundar and his team, but I want Google to dance.” .......... “I want people to know that Microsoft made them dance.” ............ But if you’re a new creator, and you just want to communicate with some audience, it is far more likely that you will end up on TikTok, Substack, or Instagram, maybe YouTube, which you have access to. But those platforms, they’re not so visible to the average Google Search user. So the new stuff, the high-quality stuff, the more interesting stuff, maybe, is ending up on platforms that Google Search can’t see. .........
As AI becomes multimodal, this distinction we feel between text and images and video blurs over time.
........ if anything, I’m using a lot more of the web still. I go to The Verge website all the time. .......... we had, arguably, two of the top three, maybe, research teams in the world ....... If you look at the 10 to 20 seminal breakthroughs, which led to this moment where we are, those two teams together account for a large number of them. .......... I think the most important thing is having clarity about what you’re trying to accomplish. And once you do that, everything else follows from that........ we have 15 products with the scale we have or six products over 2 billion users each. ......... I’ve been preparing for this moment around AI for 10-plus years. It’s not an accident at Google [that] we brought Geoff Hinton in or we built Google Brain or we acquired DeepMind. We spent the investment that’s needed. We built TPUs. We announced TPUs at I/O maybe six years ago now. This is something I’ve anticipated for a long time. I’m excited that it’s an inflection point. .India starts inquiry into Google app payments antitrust compliance
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