Recently, it is time for listed technology companies to intensively announce quarterly financial reports.
From Google, Facebook, Baidu, Sogou and other companies betting on AI, the financial report data has undoubtedly increased significantly, which also shows the industry's recognition of AI.
When reviewing the quarterly business, each company is not only talking about the advantages of AI technology, but also focusing more on applications and scenarios, such as Baidu's unmanned vehicles, Sogou's machine simultaneous interpretation, and Google's smart speakers, etc. . For the future, these companies are even more optimistic about the blessing of AI for their entire business.
Below, Xiaozhijun will show you the "AI financial reports" of each company.
Today, Baidu released its unaudited financial report for the first quarter of fiscal 2018. According to the report, Baidu’s total revenue in the first quarter was 20.9 billion yuan (about 3.33 billion U.S. dollars), a year-on-year increase of 31%; its net profit was 6.7 billion yuan (about 1.1 billion U.S. dollars), a year-on-year increase of 277%. Overall, Baidu's first-quarter revenue and profit exceeded Wall Street expectations.
In this regard, Baidu CEO Robin Li also praised artificial intelligence, saying, "In 2018, we have a strong start, and our core business has grown rapidly. The strategy of 'consolidating the mobile foundation and winning the AI era' continues to advance firmly. Through continuous innovation, Apollo's open platform shows It has great potential to become a world-class technology platform.”
On the one hand, Baidu, which started out as a search business, has since adjusted the company's strategy to "All In AI", but it is still one of the "pillars" of Baidu's overall business. However, to get rid of its heavy reliance on search advertising, Baidu has focused on content distribution.
For example, driven by AI, the information flow is used as a new growth engine. Through AI technology empowerment, Baidu brings high-quality experience to users and customers, and also stimulates the continuous and stable growth of this traditional business. In addition, AI technology helps to continuously improve the efficiency of advertising, and can present slightly different personalized advertising recommendations according to user preferences.
On the other hand, the strong development momentum of Baidu 's Apollo ecosystem has also become an important aspect of this quarter's financial report. During this quarter, Baidu Apollo's unmanned fleet not only debuted in the Spring Festival Gala in February, but also released the latest open source version of Apollo 2.5 last week, which supports highway scenarios, reduces development costs, and expands the ecosystem. In addition, Baidu has now obtained the first batch of public road test licenses for autonomous vehicles in Beijing, Chongqing, and Fujian, and its open platform partners have reached 100.
As for DuerOS, according to the financial report data, Baidu has jointly released more than 90 hardware products equipped with DuerOS. Top hardware manufacturers such as Haier, TCL, Midea, and Skyworth have all equipped DuerOS as a smart hardware entrance. It is worth mentioning that in 2018, Baidu became the first Chinese company in history to be selected as one of the "Top Ten Breakthrough Technologies in the World" by MIT Technology Review for three consecutive years.
It seems that the good start of Baidu's financial report in the first quarter of 2018 has a great relationship with Baidu's AI empowerment.
Sogou released its unaudited first-quarter earnings yesterday. According to the report, Sogou’s revenue in the first quarter was US$248.4 million, a year-on-year increase of 53%. According to the US GAAP calculation, the net profit attributable to Sogou in the first quarter was US$15.3 million, a year-on-year increase of 25%.
When it comes to Sogou's artificial intelligence, it has always sought to differentiate itself from its rivals.
Regarding future measures in this field, CEO Wang Xiaochuan said on the conference call, "We are emphasizing the processing and understanding of natural language, with this language understanding as the core, including related speech, images, dialogue, question-and-answer and translation. Technology, and will not do other aspects of OS or distraction, so Sogou can be in a leading position in the field that it is good at, which is not only part of our existing scene, but also something we are very good at doing.”
When it comes to Sogou's AI technology, the one most familiar to everyone is Sogou simultaneous interpretation. From roundtable exchanges in various fields, to the World Internet Conference, the Belt and Road National Strategic Dialogue, and even the ongoing GMIC Conference, Sogou Simultaneous Interpretation has participated in hundreds of conferences so far. There is progress and improvement. It can be said that Sogou simultaneous interpretation has now become an "old driver" in the field of machine simultaneous interpretation. At the same time, Sogou also launched a search translation machine in March and began to implement hardware.
Wang Xiaochuan said, "From the perspective of the annual trend in 2018, hardware will have a steady increase in the proportion of our company's revenue, and the gross profit margin will also increase accordingly, but the purpose of our hardware is not to pursue revenue. Instead, these profits will be invested in our research and development to improve the service capabilities behind.”
Google's parent company Alphabet's first-quarter earnings report came earlier. According to the financial report, Alphabet’s total revenue in the first quarter was $31.146 billion, a year-on-year increase of 26%, and its net profit was $9.401 billion, an increase of 73% from $5.426 billion in the same period last year, both exceeding market expectations.
It's a little embarrassing that Google's stock ended the day down despite the stellar numbers. It is understood that Alphabet's first quarter was able to double-beat market expectations, thanks to its huge search engine division. One of the more interesting is the loss of its smart home brand Nest.
Nest was merged into Google's hardware group earlier this year, so Nest's revenue and losses are included on Google's balance sheet. Nest earned $726 million in revenue for the full year, but ended up losing $621 million, according to the earnings report. In other words, Google spent more than $500 million last year on its security cameras, alarm systems and video doorbells.
In response, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Flag on the earnings conference call that Google's newly established hardware division will achieve "the scale we want to see" in two to three years, which will be able to compete with Amazon and Apple. of smartphones and smart speakers.
Sundar Pichai also said, “Artificial intelligence opens up new opportunities for everyone, and just in the last few months we have seen amazing applications, such as dairy farmers using TensorFlow to improve the health of their livestock; our researchers have developed Using machine learning to detect a person's risk of developing heart disease. It can be said that the possibilities of AI in the medical field are very exciting."
As for the split of Google's search and artificial intelligence departments, Sundar Pichai also explained on the conference call: "Obviously, the search business has always been the company's main line, and the application of machine learning and AI in this field is also working well. However, as a company with an AI-first strategy, artificial intelligence will permeate all Google work. Jeff Dean has been at Google for 18 years, and he will be very suitable for our artificial intelligence work, and we also believe that these changes will Provide better service for the company.”
According to a report released by Facebook, the company’s total revenue in the first quarter was US$11.966 billion, a year-on-year increase of 49%, exceeding market expectations of US$11.41 billion. Earnings per share of $1.69, up 63% year over year, beat consensus estimates of $1.35 per share.
Zuckerberg, its founder and chief executive, said that based on the earnings data, the company is barely affected by the data breach scandal, at least for now , and Facebook is still proud of its business model. "As you know, we have important problems to solve. Most of the time we focus on bringing benefits to our users and fail to take steps to prevent the harms of these tools—whether interfering Elections, fake news, hate speech or data privacy.”
Here, Zuckerberg's statement is not much different from the previous hearings, on the one hand to develop advanced artificial intelligence technology, on the other hand to hire more people to conduct content review. For example, Facebook has previously developed an AI technology to detect users with suicidal tendencies, and Zuckerberg has firmly established his "artificial intelligence solves everything" attitude. There are doubts about how machine learning is being deployed in content filtering. In other words, how has its artificial intelligence technology improved compared to a year ago.
Zuckerberg started from his own learning era. At that time, AI technology did not appear, and he could only manually remove the content marked by users. But now, artificial intelligence tools can identify certain content more easily than others. And for doing this great thing, he once again expressed his pride.
However, although the ideal is full, he also admits that it will take time to fully realize this goal, because there are great differences in language. But, all in all, as time goes on, "we will get better and better, which is also a very meaningful development in the future".
Microsoft's latest financial report for the third quarter of 2018 shows that Microsoft's revenue in the quarter reached $26.8 billion, an increase of 16%; operating income was $8.3 billion, an increase of 23%; net income reached $7.4 billion, an increase of 35%; Earnings per share of 95 cents, an increase of 36%, can be said to have achieved overall growth.
In this regard, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, "This quarter's performance fully reflects the trust users and enterprises place in Microsoft's cloud. We continue to innovate in core growth areas such as infrastructure, artificial intelligence, productivity and business applications to serve customers. Provide differentiated value.”
On the whole, the main reason for Microsoft to maintain its overall growth this time is its intelligent cloud product Azure. So, during the conference call, Satya Nadella said: "Microsoft has been a leader in cloud security. Advanced artificial intelligence technology receives more than hundreds of billions of signals every month to identify non-self-initiated actions and help customers deal with cyber threats."
In addition, as Microsoft 365, another important factor in promoting Microsoft's profitability, AI technology also plays an important role. Because Microsoft 365 will empower every business to use AI tools to help employees unleash their creativity and enhance teamwork while keeping their data safe from threats.
Of course, AI services are also essential products for Microsoft. In this regard, Satya Nadella said that Microsoft is now integrating its enterprise video service Microsoft Stream, adding facial recognition functions and new Cortana functions, which can be used to make calls, participate in meetings or pass users. to initiate a three-way call.
Satya Nadella said, "We made the right investment decision and it is having an impact, increasing our overall market share."