Alphabet won’t talk about the Google-Apple AI deal, even to investors

Alphabet declined to respond to one of its investors who asked questions about Google’s artificial intelligence deal with Apple on its fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. Instead of answering an analyst’s question about how the tech giant thinks about AI partnerships, such as partnering with Apple to power Siri’s AI, the question was completely ignored.

This decision tells us something: Alphabet is not ready to talk about how this partnership will impact its core business, which is increasingly focused on artificial intelligence.

Over the years, the relationship between Google and Apple has been mutually beneficial. The search partnership between the two companies saw the search giant pay the iPhone maker 20 billion dollars To be the default search engine on Apple devices, filings From the lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice against the search giant. In contrast, Google was able to reach the huge customer base of Apple – the manufacturer of the iPhone – in the last quarter Announce It has 2.5 billion active devices worldwide to give you an idea of ​​the size.

The latest Apple AI deal is It is rumored to cost Apple approximately $1 billion annuallybut the payoff beyond that for Google is not as immediately obvious as it is with search. In Google search, consumers see links to advertisers’ websites at the top of the search results. AI-placed ads, which could one day represent the future of Google’s search business, are still an “experiment” for now.

Company first Announce Last May, it will bring ads into AI mode, a chatbot-style interface for Google Search, but these tests see ads placed below or embedded in chatbot responses. Google is also trying out Agent shopping, Including shopping using artificial intelligence modeto direct consumers with product-related inquiries to a seamless checkout experience from the AI ​​interface.

Meanwhile, Google’s AI competitor Anthropic is targeting ad-supported AI Next Super Bowl ad, Which challenges the business model embraced by ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Google.

How all this will develop in the long term remains an open question – and, even today, an unanswered question, it seems.

Overall, the Apple Siri deal barely received any mention during Alphabet’s earnings on Wednesday. Pichai noted only that he is pleased that Apple is the “cloud provider of choice” and will help develop “the next generation of Apple enterprise models based on Gemini technology.” Philip Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, used the exact same wording when mentioning Apple as well.