Hello, Tech Editor Alexei Oreskovic here.
The one thing that was certain going into this week's Big Tech earnings season is that A.I. would be at the center of the show. And indeed, while the financial results varied, with Meta's and Alphabet's advertising revenues coming in much stronger than expected and Snap's forecast surprising on the downside, mentions of artificial intelligence rang through all the earnings calls, almost like a common religious chant.
Executives at Intel, Microsoft, and Meta all invoked the magic word dozens of times. At Microsoft, which helped kick off the generative A.I. craze with its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, talk of A.I. outpaced even references to the cloud, the foundation of CEO Satya Nadella's turnaround.
But the winner of the A.I. contest was Alphabet, whose executives managed to say A.I. 82 times during the 60-minute call, by my count. Search, by contrast, which represents roughly 60% of Alphabet's business, was mentioned a relatively low 30 times.
Obviously, there's only so much you can conclude about a company's business and its priorities from tabulating the buzzwords of its leadership team. And the results can be affected by the questions analysts choose to ask company executives on the conference calls. Still, it's an interesting way to get a sense of the zeitgeist at play at different companies—and it's fun.
At Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned the word "efficiency" eight times, in keeping with his so-called Year of Efficiency. The metaverse—the virtual world that the company renamed itself for—came up 11 times during the call, compared to 63 A.I. mentions.
Social, as in the social networking that has helped Facebook attain 3 billion users? Just three mentions by Meta executives on Wednesday's earnings call. That's the same number of times that Microsoft executives referred to Activision, the video game company it's acquiring for $69 billion. When it closes, it will be the largest deal in Microsoft's nearly five-decade history.
More news below.
Alexei Oreskovic
