back to article Alphabet posts big revenue and profit growth, just 1,100 job losses

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has warned that the Department of Justice's proposed remedies for Google's monopolistic behaviour could impact US leadership of the global tech market – after announcing enormous growth in the megalithic firm's ad business. The conglomerate on Tuesday announced [PDF] Q3 2024 revenue of $88.25 billion …

  1. mhoneywell

    25% my arse

    What a an absolute crock of shit

    1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      Re: 25% my arse

      But the ceo said it... it must be true, ceos never lie.

      1. UCAP Silver badge

        Re: 25% my arse

        As the saying goes: "there a lies, damn lies, and CEO statements"

        1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
          Big Brother

          Re: 25% my arse

          OR...

          As the saying goes: "there a lies, damn lies, and unbiased Google search results"

          Just go cold turkey and give Google the middle finger. It is possible.

    2. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      Re: 25% my arse

      AI probably did generate 25% of something, we just have no idea of whether that 25% is actually used or important, it could just be a lump of files sitting on a HD gathering dust.

    3. Kevin McMurtrie Silver badge

      Re: 25% my arse

      I believe it. gRPC and Protobuf makes an absolute mess of code when there are complex data structures. It uses special calling conventions and special objects that don't align with any language's or framework's native design. 20 to 90 percent of a service can be nothing but conversion efforts.

      Google is too proud of gRPC to fix it. I can see them asking AI to write adapters and then patting themselves on the back for being innovative geniuses.

      1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

        Re: 25% my arse

        grpc and p are over 10 year sold before the AI hype. Sorry no bananas.

    4. O'Reg Inalsin

      Re: 25% my arse

      It's easier to say for certain what it doesn't mean - FACT: If no humans were involved in new code or maintenance, there would be 0% new code and maintenance, not 25% of what is produced at present.

      As for what it could mean - However, if no genAI were involved, 100% of new code and maintenance could still be achieved - but it would take X% longer. X is not known exactly, but it is certainly less than 25%. To boost that number X you can cherry pick cases ad nauseam.

  2. Jamesit

    "Alphabet posts big revenue and profit growth"

    They should be able to pay the fine in Russia then.:-D

  3. idler

    "One workload from which Google itself is benefiting is code generation: Pichai said a quarter of the Chocolate Factory's new code is now written by machines and then reviewed by humans. "This Helps our engineers do more and move faster," the CEO enthused."

    And after they've laid off all their senior engineers and it fails, the CEO won't be so enthused once he realizes all they have left are script kiddies who can't code shit.

    1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      THis is bullshit, Everybody knows the larger a PR the less it gets reviewed. 50 lines sure, its humanly possible for a person to look and reason what it does and doesnt do. Generate 1 million lines of changes or new code and nobody really knows all the things it may or mya not do.

    2. JustAnotherDistro

      "Do more and move faster"

      How is it that the CEOs of the largest companies in the world often use language more suited to eight-year-olds? "Do more and move faster"? Seems he slipped up, "faster" boasts two syllables.

      What a bunch of hypocritical, condescending parasites.

      1. MonkeyJuice Bronze badge

        Re: "Do more and move faster"

        Because they're very beautiful businesses. Very successful. Huge. And if you don't agree you are just nasty, so very nasty and stupid.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: "Do more and move faster"

          ah, the orange twat speaks

      2. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

        Re: "Do more and move faster"

        The real q is why are such utter morons placed in those positions in the first place. Its like allowing a cat or dog to fly a plane.

        1. druck Silver badge

          Re: "Do more and move faster"

          As sentient creatures, they have far more interest in their own survival than an AI system.

        2. MonkeyJuice Bronze badge

          Re: "Do more and move faster"

          "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."

          Douglas Adams

      3. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

        Re: "Do more and move faster"

        The joke is on you for thinking that any ceo is actually capable of doing anything but bullshit.

        Grow a brain.

    3. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Trollface

      nobody left that knows anything

      " the CEO won't be so enthused once he realizes all they have left are script kiddies who can't code shit."

      And biased algorithms from AI-written code could generate unexpectedky inaccurate search results.

      How are those script kiddies gonna fix THAT, hmmm?

  4. JustAnotherDistro

    Cui bono

    Informative and provocative article; thanks, Reg.

    After reading it, I'm baffled, kind of.

    I'm living in a world without Waymobiles. I use Youtube no more than previously; maybe less. I don't see ads, except when traveling and using my phone, if my VPN is off, and I don't buy ads. I have learned not to trust the Google AI summaries, as the contain a lot of misinformation scraped from web pages that have not been updated, in the fields of medicine and desktop Linux functionality; I use Google search less and less as a result, because it actually now stands in the way of getting reliable responses. If it told me the sources it used, I'd be fine with its answers, as I could check them. That is how Feynman would do it, and that is how I learned to learn, when I got the PhD: go to the sources.

    Sadly, then, I am missing out on the benefits that this company is offering the world now, which are quantifiably more beneficial with each passing day. Would those benefits be for the companies whose phone trees are getting longer and longer? Or those with chatbots or AI assistants that never--and I mean, never, 0-%-success rate, handle my customer service problem, without my eventually consulting an actual human being, who does it immediately? If only creeping monopolisation had not locked down every single segment of American commerce, I would be glad of them reducing costs, but as it is, I know that I will never see the cost savings, in the absence of competition.

    I just can't celebrate Alphabet's success.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Cui bono

      @ JustAnotherDistro: That deserves a million upvotes.

      1. JustAnotherDistro

        Re: Cui bono

        Thanks. It's responses like yours that keep me going, because they take an actual effort to make.

        There are few of us, and we should reinforce each other as much as possible with real words, not with a graphical thumb.

        Sadly, these days, most of my comments are resigned, bitter, nasty, and puerile, and don't really even deserve any kind of thumb.

    2. Helcat Silver badge

      Re: Cui bono

      Oh, I've had one of those Chatbot AI's solve an issue for me.

      Mind you, all that was needed was for a refund for goods they admitted hadn't been delivered and were lost in transit, had been lost for four weeks, and were highly unlikely to turn up.

      Personally, a simple button to request the refund would have sufficed: The AI was doing the equivalent of following a pre-set script just to confirm the request with a caveat that should the goods actually appear, I either needed to pay for them or return them meaning it took far longer to solve the issue than clicking a button would have.

  5. theOtherJT Silver badge

    This would explain...

    ...the marked decline in the quality of their services over the last couple of years.

    I swear Google search gets less and less useful by the day and their cloud services become quirkier and buggier with every release

    1. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Trollface

      Re: This would explain...

      In a LOT of ways, it's the "CCP Model".

      * Use super cheap [AI] labor capable of doing lots of repetitive tasks at low cost without complaint nor disrupting the status quo nor even making suggestions for improvement

      * Have a handful of bureaucrat types spend all day nit-picking details but missing the big picture

      * slap it together really fast, never mind proper testing [that's for the customer or end-user to deal with] or any kind of efficiency analysis nor "overall impact" analysis

      * If it does not work right, just add more [AI] bodies, that'll solve the problem!!

      1. Blue Pumpkin

        Re: This would explain...

        Where CCP is Celebrated Capitalist Process right ?

      2. Paul 195
        Headmaster

        Re: This would explain...

        "The CCP model"? AI is the capitalist's ultimate wet dream. No need to pay labour with its irritating demands for fair treatment and a share of the profits it helped create. Just ranks of obedient machines working without breaks, health care, or complaint. Exactly who is going to pay for the output once you've sacked all the peons is still kind of unclear. Fortunately for us, AI is so far of limited use for solving real world problems. The things it can do usefully and well aren't profitable enough to justify the vast sums of money being thrown at it; the things that would be profitable (replacing humans) are so far to risky given the general flakiness of generative AI. At some point the bubble will burst and it will make the Web 1.0 collapse ln 2001 ook small in comparison.

    2. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      Re: This would explain...

      Google seach was never good or great.

      After all how does one judge there arent better results if it never displayed them to begin with ?

      Its all hype, that it was good.

      If you think about it Google Search and the page rank algo doesnt make sense, by defintion its broken because it rewards popularity and not actual value. We all know the public is hardly a good judgment, i mean doctors are outnumbered by idiots, jsut look at all the fake alternative medicine belief and web page counts.

  6. Wang Cores

    Tropico-ass lede

    "The five year plan is ahead of schedule, due to be completed in ten years!"

  7. ecofeco Silver badge

    Sub-title says it all

    ...thanks to AI, which now writes a quarter of all G-code...

    That explains everything.

  8. JamesTGrant Bronze badge

    Ctrl+a, right click, ‘auto generate doc and readme’. Boom - 25% of what is checked in is auto generated. Good? Perhaps, perhaps not. Fast? Certainly.

  9. O'Reg Inalsin

    One thing Google has done right

    "Gemini" for non-programming purposes is no longer free! And that's great. Business version is ~ 17/mo. It means Google is no longer in a race to the bottom with Open AI et. al. That means the actual utility of ROI of the genAI tools will drive their development. Unlike the business model for other-than-genAI where everything is so-called "free", resulting in ever worse performance for the user, driven by advertising and PI monetization.

    "Gemini" in colab is still free (for programming purposes) until Dec/2024.

    A beneficial side effect of pay-to-play is the boost it gives to open source and the room it creates for competition to grow. Think of the opportunities for new growth if Chrome, Android, Edge, and iOS+Safari were forced to charge just $4~5/mo subscription, and at the same time new US cellphones were required to be able to dual boot OS's, and have a standard interface allowing alternative OS to be installed and run. Much better than forcing Google to sell Chrome and/or Android to some hedge funds who will simply be worse than the status quo.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      Re: One thing Google has done right

      One has to wonder if Gemini is soo good, why would googlegive it away for $17 a month ?

      Why doesnt G just write better programs to kill all the other programs ?

  10. neilhd

    Imagine

    Working for a company that made over $20 BILLION in profit, and being laid off to "reduce costs".

    1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

      Re: Imagine

      THey forgot to mention that everyone in the Google Family is very sad and geniunely wishes everyone the best of luck.

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