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Greetings! Google might move slowly but it gets there eventually. Well, at least that's the theory. A shake-up in the management ranks of the tech giant, unveiled on Thursday, belatedly fixes a flaw in the company's artificial intelligence organization, one that had constrained its ability to compete with ChatGPT's creator, OpenAI. CEO Sundar Pichai today moved the team behind Google's Gemini AI chatbot from its search and ads unit to its DeepMind AI research team, a change announced alongside the appointment of a new search leader. You have to wonder whether the departing search leader, Prabhakar Raghavan, changed jobs because he was losing Gemini or whether Pichai took advantage of the personnel change to make a long-needed shift. Either way, the rearrangement corrects a mistake made last year, when Pichai combined Google's two AI research efforts under DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis but didn't give Hassabis oversight of how AI products got rolled out. Instead, as we noted in this piece in April, the people responsible for building Google's conversational AI technology (Hassabis' team) weren't involved with rolling it out to users (the Gemini team under Raghavan). That created issues: In March this year, an uproar over Gemini spewing racist responses to user queries frustrated the DeepMind team. Hassabis told his staff at the time that employees across Google would communicate better to prevent such embarrassments in the future. Well, the best way to ensure such communication is to have everyone working under one boss. And as Pichai hinted in his announcement today, the new structure will correct another inefficiency: The DeepMind team and the Gemini chatbot team were both spending money tweaking the underlying Gemini models. Today's shake-up also makes clear the ascendancy of Hassabis, a recent Nobel Prize winner who now oversees Google's all-important AI research and one of its most important AI products: the chatbot. My colleague, Amir Efrati, a Google-ologist from way back, argues that Hassabis is now positioned to eventually succeed Pichai as CEO. That may depend on how Hassabis does in his new role and whether he can erase OpenAI's lead—ChatGPT had 11 million paying subscribers as of last month. Still, shareholders in Google's parent company, Alphabet, who nowadays have to fret about looming antitrust threats as well as competition from OpenAI and others, should be pleased that Pichai has fixed this one issue. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi may be experiencing a moment of nostalgia. The Financial Times on Thursday reported that Uber had "explored a possible bid for Expedia," the travel booking site Khosrowshahi ran before he took the reins at Uber in 2017. Uber shares immediately lost ground. It's usually not a good sign when a company is contemplating making an acquisition outside its core business. There's little obvious synergy between Uber and Expedia, other than Khosrowshahi's history (he is still on the Expedia board). Sure, someone booking a flight could get an offer to book an Uber to the airport. But airport trips are already a big business for Uber: Is there enough incremental airport business possible to justify the costs of buying Expedia, which is worth around $20 billion? Chances are, an Uber-Expedia tie-up would end up as one of those dumb deals promoted by bankers that ends up getting unwound within a few years (think AOL and Time Warner, eBay and Skype, Quaker Oats and Snapple). Before we pooh-pooh this deal, though, we should note that the FT story said no discussions were now underway. In fact, all that happened is that after an outsider suggested the Expedia idea, the company "approached advisers in recent months" to figure out whether a deal was possible. Khosrowshahi's role on the board of Expedia does present a slight complication, after all. The fact that Uber executives talked to their advisers suggests Khosrowshahi was intrigued, however, even if he has dropped the idea. Uber shareholders made their displeasure known. Expedia stock rose 4.8%, lifting its market capitalization by $933 million. But Uber stock dropped 2.4%, cutting its market cap by $4.2 billion. Wall Street does not like this idea. - Netflix reported 15% higher revenue of $9.8 billion for the third quarter and 41% higher net income, while subscriber growth slowed from the past few quarters. Netflix projected a similar level of revenue growth in the fourth quarter but said 2025 revenue growth would slow to between 11% and 13%. Netflix shares rose 5% after hours.
- Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. lifted third-quarter revenues 39% to $23.5 billion and net income by 54%, as the world's biggest chipmaker benefited from surging demand for AI chips.
- Baidu CEO Robin Li compared the current AI frenzy to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, predicting that only 1% of AI companies will eventually stand out and become huge.
- Payment giant Stripe is in talks to buy Bridge, a San Francisco–based stablecoin infrastructure startup, for $1 billion, Forbes reported, citing people familiar with the discussions.
- Silver Lake has agreed to buy enterprise software firm Zuora at a value of $1.7 billion, Zuora said.
- Amazon has opened a new type of small grocery store next to a Whole Foods Market. More here.
- Meta Platforms on Wednesday reorganized and laid off staff on several teams, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Reality Labs, Meta's augmented and virtual reality unit, The Verge reported.
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