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- Alphabet said in its Q4 earnings press release that it will begin disclosing investments in AI.
- The move signals the increasing importance of AI to the search giant.
- Q4 earnings showed a slowdown in revenue growth from the previous year.
Google parent company Alphabet announced in its Q4 earnings report that it will make a change in how it discloses its investments in artificial intelligence going forward.
Whereas previously its DeepMind AI research division was buried within the "Other Bets" category, it will be reported as part of Alphabet's corporate costs, reflecting its increasing use across the entire company in areas like Google Services and Google Clouds.
"As AI is critical to delivering our mission of bringing our breakthrough innovations into the real world, beginning in January 2023, we will update our segment reporting relating to certain of Alphabet's AI activities," the press release states.
Alphabet's latest move signals to the market that it's are serious about investing in the rapidly advancing space. Google has been under pressure by OpenAI and its ChatGPT product, which can respond to queries with human-language responses based on information its gathered from around the web.
Investors will be eyeing how the search giant responds to the challenge, as OpenAI investor Microsoft plans to integrate the chatbot technology into its Bing search engine, Information reported. It will also incorporate the technology into its Azure cloud offerings so developers can take advantage of the AI technology. Microsoft already offers another OpenAI service, the code-writing tool Codex, through GitHub.
Breaking out its investments in particular projects offers transparency to investors, who can see the exact financial performance of Alphabet's various projects. Alphabet revealed Google Cloud and YouTube's financial performance for the first time in 2020, for instance.