Google might be in the lead in their AI capability, says Constellation's Ray Wang
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New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Trump says Fed's Powell is ready to start slashing interest rates
President Trump said Friday that he believes Fed Chair Jerome Powell is ready to start slashing interest rates. Trump, who for months has hammered Powell for being slow to cut rates, toured the Fed's controversial $2.5 billion building project with the embattled central banker on Thursday. 'I think we had a very good meeting on interest rates. And [Powell] said to me…very strongly, the country is doing well. He said congratulations,' Trump told reporters Friday. Advertisement 3 President Trump and Jerome Powell at a tour of the Fed's construction site. REUTERS 'I got that to mean that I think he's going to start recommending lower rates because of that conversation.' The Fed declined to comment about Trump's optimism for a rate cut. Advertisement A Fed official released a statement Friday saying the central bank was 'honored' to welcome Trump and other Republican officials. A spokesperson for the Fed said it was 'grateful' for Trump's encouragement to complete the renovation of its Washington HQ and that it 'looked forward' to seeing the project through to completion. Policymakers will hold a two-day meeting next week before deciding whether to slash the rate from its current range between 4.25% and 4.5%. Powell has said the Fed should wait for more data before adjusting rates because of concerns over the impact of Trump's tariffs on inflation Advertisement It seems more likely that the Fed will cut rates after its September meeting, with 62.3% odds, according to CME FedWatch. Trump, who called Powell a 'numbskull' earlier this week for failing to heed the White House's demand for a large reduction in borrowing costs, also said on Thursday he did not intend to fire the Fed chief, as he has frequently suggested he would. Interest rates should be lowered by as much as three percentage points, Trump has said. 3 President Trump and Jerome Powell at one point argued over the total cost of the renovations. REUTERS Advertisement Powell has argued that the economy is strong enough that it can withstand higher rates. White House budget director Russel Vought on Friday continued to blast the Fed's $2.5 billion renovation project and call for a review of the central bank. 'There's a whole host of issues with regard to the Fed, and we want to make sure that those questions get answered over time,' Vought told CNBC's 'Squawk Box.' 3 President Trump speaks with reporters on Friday. AP 'This is not a pressure campaign on the Fed chairman,' he added. Vought also said the White House still plans to follow through on what Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said is the need for a review of 'the entire' Federal Reserve. Trump visited the Fed's headquarters decked-out in a hardhat for a tour of the construction site. Advertisement At one point, Trump and Powell argued over the costs of the renovation, which the president said had gone over-budget at $3.1 billion. Powell said the figure remained $2.5 billion and that Trump was including the costs of a separate, previously-completed building.
The Verge
an hour ago
- The Verge
Google gets its swag back
This week, I take a look at the surprisingly strong state of Google, Meta gets a new chief AI researcher, and more. If you haven't already, be sure to check out this week's Decoder episode about deepfakes and where they are headed. Also, do you use an AI coding tool like Cursor or GitHub Copilot? I'd love to know what works and what doesn't… After spending time with Google executives during the company's I/O conference in May, it was clear that they were feeling confident. Now, I'm beginning to see why. ChatGPT is not making Google Search obsolete. If anything, AI is making Google stronger than before. During Google's earnings call this week, CEO Sundar Pichai announced that AI Overviews in search results 'are now driving over 10-percent more queries globally for the types of queries that show them, and this growth continues to increase over time.' Put simply, when Google works like ChatGPT, people use it more. Pichai noted that this is particularly true for younger people, a demographic that the 10-blue-links version of Google had been losing relevance with for a long time. ChatGPT doesn't appear to be curbing the growth of the Gemini app, either. Pichai said that daily prompts to Gemini increased by over 50 percent from the previous quarter. Gemini now has more than 450 million monthly users, up from 350 million in March. Google processed nearly a quadrillion AI tokens across all its products last month, which is more than double the number it processed in May. Another telling sign of confidence has been Google's reaction to the AI talent wars. 'I look at both our retention metrics as well as the new talent coming in, and both are healthy,' Pichai said on the earnings call. 'I do know individual cases can make headlines. But when we look at numbers deeply, I think we are doing very well through this moment.' While Mark Zuckerberg has managed to poach talented researchers from DeepMind, my sources say that Pichai and Demis Hassabis have been resistant to bidding wars and amenable to letting most people go. Contrast this with the mood at OpenAI, where research chief Mark Chen compared Meta's poaching to the feeling of a home invasion. There's an industry-wide belief that DeepMind's bench is deep enough to withstand defections and that the company can quickly make reverse acquihire moves, such as its recent Windsurf deal, as more AI startups seek refuge from the money-intensive game that only Big Tech seems capable of truly playing. 'Meta right now is not at the frontier,' Hassabis said in an interview with Lex Fridman this week. 'Maybe they'll manage to get back on there, and it's probably rational what they're doing from their perspective because they're behind and they need to do something.' Implicit in that statement is the idea that Google is operating from a position of strength in the AI race, a notion with which all the major players I've spoken with privately agree. Google is by no means unassailable. GPT-5 is coming soon and could blow past Gemini. ChatGPT is the Kleenex of chatbots, and that doesn't appear to be changing anytime soon. Meanwhile, Google is sending fewer clicks to websites, which threatens the give-and-take model that has fueled its business to this point. There's a real chance that Google's business may be broken up by the US government. At the very least, it will probably have to stop paying Apple for default status on the iPhone. Even still, AI so far isn't the threat to Google's business that many thought it would be. Instead, it's increasingly looking like Google is stronger than ever. - Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a public memo to employees acknowledging recent layoffs and the company's climbing stock price. - Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a leaked message to employees about seeking funding from the Middle East. - Incoming OpenAI exec Fidji Simo subtly laying the groundwork for ads in ChatGPT. - Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on the All-In podcast. - Windsurf's second hire, Prem Qu Nair, on X, describing the way Google hired away the startup's core engineering team. Some interesting career moves this week: More to click on: If you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe to The Verge, which includes unlimited access to Command Line and all of our reporting. Let me know if you have thoughts on this issue or a good story about the AI talent wars. You can respond here or ping me securely on Signal. Thanks for subscribing. 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Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Google Cloud jacks up CapEx to build more cloud
This story was originally published on CIO Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily CIO Dive newsletter. Dive Brief: Google Cloud tacked $10 billion onto its $75 billion capital expenditure plans for the year, executives said Wednesday during a Q2 2025 earnings call. The company will pour the lion's share of $85 billion into cloud infrastructure and AI processing capacity, according to Google and Alphabet CFO Anat Ashkenazi. 'Our updated outlook reflects additional investment in servers, the timing of delivery of servers and an acceleration in the pace of data center construction, primarily to meet cloud customer demand,' Ashkenazi said. Google Cloud revenues grew 32% to $13.6 billion in the second quarter, as it raced to keep pace with growing demand for its cloud and AI services. The company spent $22.4 billion in capital expenditures during the quarter, largely to build out technical infrastructure. Roughly two-thirds of the investment went toward servers and the remainder into data centers and networking equipment, Ashkenazi said. Dive Insight: Cloud is the engine and big data the fuel driving the proliferation of large language model technologies. In the ongoing rush to deploy generative AI capabilities, Google and its larger hyperscale competitors AWS and Microsoft are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in hardware and facilities. Capacity buildouts drove a 53% year-over-year increase in data center investment during the first quarter, according to Dell'Oro Group. The spending spree gained midyear momentum as Google committed more than $25 billion to building domestic AI infrastructure and Oracle partnered with OpenAI to bring 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity on line in concert with the Stargate initiative this month. OpenAI, which received much of its initial funding and compute from Microsoft, tapped Google last month for additional capacity, putting an additional strain on the hyperscaler's resources. 'With respect to OpenAI, we are very excited to be partnering with them on Google Cloud,' Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, said during the earnings call. 'Google Cloud is an open platform, and we have a strong history of supporting great companies, startups, AI labs, etcetera.' Data center constructions don't happen overnight. In addition to capital investments, projects have complex logistical and permitting requirements. The Trump administration addressed these issues in an executive order issued Wednesday that aims to fast-track AI infrastructure project approvals. 'It's a tight supply environment and we are investing more to expand, but there is obviously a time delay,' Pichai said. More than 85,000 enterprises leveraged Google's Gemini model family to build AI tools during the second quarter, contributing to a 35X year-over-year usage increase, according to Pichai. The executive touted the company's expansion into generative AI automation tools through its Agentspace service while noting the technology is still in development. 'The forward-looking trajectory will really unlock these agentic experiences," Pichai said. "We see the potential. We're able to do them, but they're a bit slow and costly and take time and sometimes are brittle … I expect 2026 to be the year in which people use agent experiences more broadly.' The company is already projecting a further increase in CapEx next year to satisfy customer demand and power Google products and services. 'We're working hard to bring more capacity online, which means data centers and servers are coming online, and we see more of an increase towards the back end of the year,' Ashkenazi said. 'This is not the type of investment that's a light switch — it takes time to make this investment.' Recommended Reading Google Cloud revenue soars as AI drives billions in infrastructure spend Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
