businessinsider.com
The Googleplex is in flux.CEO Sundar Pichai announced a series of re-orgs in a memo to staff on Thursday, and — surprise, surprise — Google says it’s all happening because of artificial intelligence.Pichai said the changes, which include merging different parts of the company, would help Google “simplify decisions” and move faster.This includes further merging its central AI teams. Last year, Google combined Brain, a group that sat within its AI Research group, with DeepMind to form a new super-…
8 days ago
businessinsider.com
Google is laying off more employees and restructuring some teams.Several teams across Google’s finance and real estate units have been affected, according to two current employees, who said staff had been informed of the cuts this week. One said that the affected teams in finance include Google’s Treasury, Business Services, and Revenue Cash Operations teams.It’s unclear if other parts of the company are affected or how many roles have been cut. One current employee said the changes were “pretty…
9 days ago
businessinsider.com
Microsoft is opening a new artificial-intelligence unit in London, putting itself firmly on the turf of its biggest AI rival: Google DeepMind.The announcement came just weeks after Microsoft hired the DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman to run its new AI division. In a blog post published Sunday, Suleyman said the new London unit would be run by the former DeepMind researcher Jordan Huffman.Microsoft already has offices in the UK’s capital and previously pledged to invest £2.5 billion in UK data…
18 days ago
businessinsider.com
It’s the time of year when Google employees discover how much of a pay bump they’re getting. For many, this year comes with a bit of a shock.Google has reduced the size of the compensation packages it’s handing out to staff this year, with some employees even seeing a reduction in their overall pay, they learned this month.Compensation packages are made up of base salary, bonuses, and equity grants. Once a year, following performance reviews, employees learn how their packages should increase ov…
about 1 month ago
businessinsider.com
Our smartphones have never been so powerful, and so boring.But there’s good news: It doesn’t have to be this way, and tech companies are taking some big swings at what the future of the phone could be.Artificial-intelligence hype and gradual improvements in connectivity are inspiring companies to not only play with how things like generative AI can make our phones more interesting but also ask questions about what these gadgets in our pockets should look and feel like — and whether they should e…
about 1 month ago
businessinsider.com
There’s a grand bargain at the heart of the web: A small piece of code that has maintained order for decades. Robots.txt lets website owners choose whether to let Google and other tech giants scrape their online content. Most sites have let Google do this because the company distributes so much valuable traffic.Then, the AI wars began. It turns out that all this content has been stored in datasets that are the foundation for training powerful AI models, including those from OpenAI, Google, Meta,…
about 1 month ago
businessinsider.com
Artificial intelligence is driving us into the era of edge computing — two words you should expect to hear more in the coming months and years.Tech giants have poured billions of dollars into the cloud and spent years trying to get customers to move data onto remote servers. Now they’re expanding to edge computing, which refers to moving more of the computation closer to the user (the “edge” of the network).Whether it’s your smartphone, an autonomous car, or a security device in your home, edge…
about 2 months ago
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It’s tough in the Googleplex right now.The search giant, already feeling the heat of sudden and fierce competition in AI, has been making some very public snafus.Google just hit pause on its Gemini image generator, which was creating historically inaccurate pictures. The slip-up was so bad it sent the company’s stock tumbling, and had CEO Sundar Pichai address the troops, calling the situation “completely unacceptable.“The debacle has strengthened the narrative that Google is suddenly behind in…
about 2 months ago
businessinsider.com
Just two months after Google launched Gemini, its flashy new AI model, the company revealed that it had already built a better version. Gemini 1.5, Google said, was bigger, faster, and more capable than its predecessor. The February 15 announcement, outlined in a giddy 1,600-word blog post replete with sizzle reels, prompted buzzy coverage among AI researchers and the tech press.For a few hours, anyway.Later that day, OpenAI introduced Sora, a tool that generates videos up to 60 seconds long bas…
about 2 months ago
businessinsider.com
Prince Harry wears one. Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey track their sleep with theirs. Jennifer Anniston says Jimmy Kimmel got her hooked on hers.Smart rings are having a moment. In fact, they’ve been having a moment for a few years. But one of the headline acts of Mobile World Congress this year is Samsung’s Galaxy Ring — a smart ring that tracks heart rate, sleep, and even fertility. Analysts think it has the potential to dominate the market.Samsung is only teasing its for now — the ones at MW…
about 2 months ago
businessinsider.com
You can’t turn a corner at Mobile World Congress 2024 without someone mentioning “artificial intelligence.” Those words have been tossed around vaguely in keynotes and roundtables, but one thing has become clear: AI is most definitely coming for our smartphones.At the tech event in Barcelona, several companies and chipmakers came to demo ways generative-AI tools could be moving into our pockets.Sure, your phone can already access ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini chatbot, but these require an internet…
about 2 months ago
businessinsider.com
Pivotal, the flying-car company that Larry Page, a cofounder of Google, backs, announced this week it had laid off nine employees, or 10% of its staff, according to the company and a memo seen by Business Insider.In an internal note sent Thursday, Ken Karklin, the CEO of Pivotal, told staff that the company made cuts following an internal workforce review and that it needed to “make room for different skill sets and competencies.“Karklin said the cuts were not related to individual performance o…
2 months ago
businessinsider.com
Google is on a heater.The company just announced yet another new family of artificial-intelligence models named Gemma. These are smaller than Gemini, Google’s biggest model, but their technical data is publicly available, and researchers and developers can customize them.In the past three months, Google has launched Gemini, killed Bard and renamed it Gemini, launched a better version named Gemini Advanced (not to be confused with Gemini Ultra, which is the name of the model), launched another im…
2 months ago
businessinsider.com
As Google injects artificial intelligence into every product it possibly can, it’s also turning to AI to make its business more efficient.The company has launched a large language model named Goose that’s just for employees. It is designed to assist with building new products, according to internal documents reviewed by Business Insider.The documents describe Goose as a “descendant of Gemini,” its big new large language model. Goose is “trained on the sum total of 25 years of engineering experti…
2 months ago
businessinsider.com
In October, Business Insider sat down with Sissie Hsiao, Google’s head of the AI products Bard and Assistant, to discuss how the company planned to merge those services under a new super-product called “Assistant with Bard.“Well, you can scrap that name. Now, everything is becoming Gemini.Google has just announced it’s renaming its newest and flashiest AI products after the large language model that powers them. Bard, the chatbot it launched almost a year ago, is now named “Gemini.” Duet AI, Goo…
3 months ago
businessinsider.com
Larry Page has spent the last decade amassing an impressive collection of private islands. It’s even bigger than we thought.The Google cofounder purchased Cayo Norte, a large private island in Puerto Rico, in 2018, according to documents reviewed by Business Insider.Page picked up the island for $32 million using a limited liability company named US Virgin Island Properties, which BI previously identified as one Page had used for buying islands across the Caribbean. Page and his wife, Lucinda So…
3 months ago
businessinsider.com
Google is laying off several hundred employees in its advertising-sales team, Business Insider has learned.The search giant plans to cut hundreds of roles from its advertising-sales unit as part of a restructuring, Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, told staff Tuesday in a memo.Schindler wrote that the cuts were the result of changes to how Google’s sales team operated.BI previously reported that Google was shifting more staff away from large-customer sales, a team that serves t…
3 months ago
businessinsider.com
A new round of layoffs has hit Google, with cuts to teams across Google Assistant, augmented reality, and central engineering.Fitbit, which Google acquired in 2021, was among the teams impacted by the latest cuts.Fitbit founders James Park and Eric Friedman, who joined Google as part of the acquisition, announced Wednesday that they would be leaving the company — but several other senior employees are also out, according to a person familiar with the matter.Hardware engineering director Mark Mar…
4 months ago
businessinsider.com
Google has lost another key person working on its augmented reality devices, Business Insider has learned.Paul Greco, a vice president of engineering at Google, departed the company this week for a new opportunity, according to a person familiar with the matter.A Google spokesperson confirmed Greco’s departure but declined to comment on other details in this story.Greco was formerly the chief technology officer of once-highflying startup Magic Leap. He joined Google in 2021 and initially worked…
4 months ago
businessinsider.com
As the graphics-processing unit shortage continues, companies and venture capitalists are rushing to buy these chips to run powerful AI models.Nvidia, the chip giant that’s been riding the boom, announced plans to triple its production of the GPUs driving the AI revolution. Other hardware startups are racing to develop AI processors.Insider identified the top 100 people who make AI intelligent. Here are our picks for hardware. They include leaders at large companies such as Google, Nvidia, and I…
4 months ago
businessinsider.com
Google CEO Sundar Pichai gathered employees for the company’s final all-hands of 2023, on December 12. It had been a stormy year inside the tech giant, starting with an unprecedented round of layoffs and ending with the company announcing its biggest artificial intelligence project to date.There were reasons to celebrate. Google Cloud turned a profit this year for the first time. The company had launched a flurry of new AI products and updates. And, as Pichai and other executives highlighted dur…
4 months ago
