This Week in AI: The AI Boom Isn't so Artificial After All

The tech industry's love affair with artificial intelligence continued this week, when Google parent Alphabet announced that its efforts such as Gemini and Veo 3, as well as its Cloud rentable computing power division, helped increase sales by double-digits.

The company said its revenue between April and June hit $96.4 billion, a new record and higher than analyst expectations.

“AI is positively impacting every part of the business,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement. That success includes Google features like AI Overviews and AI Mode, which have divided industry watchers who have debated whether the company's dramatic (and sometimes awkward) changes are a net positive.

Google is just the beginning of what promises to be an interesting stretch of AI finance news. Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are expected to announce their respective quarterly results next week.

White House announces new AI action plan

President Donald Trump announced new executive orders designed to push US "dominance" in AI, including efforts to expand energy infrastructure, export AI technologies to other countries, expedite permits for data centers, and hold back potential regulation from states.

On one hand, this is the latest in a series of moves to help bolster US companies as AI continues to spread around the globe. But it's also an effort to stand apart from the EU and UK, who are approaching AI with more regulation in mind.

"For the US to lead in AI, we have to run fast, and the AI action plan is a great way of just laying out all the various pieces that will be helpful for us to run fast," said AMD CEO Lisa Su, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal during the announcement. "It’s a great day for those of us, like us, who are really trying to get technology adopted as fast as possible, in partnership with the government."

Google update shares NotebookLM

Have you ever wanted to borrow the notes of the top students in class?

A lot of people come to AI chatbots asking questions about specific things like details on history or recommendations about health. That hasn’t generally been a good idea because AI doesn't always get its facts right. Google may finally be solving that problem.

The tech giant released a new version of its NotebookLM technology, offering people the ability to use what it calls expert notebooks. NotebookLM was designed to train in AI on the notes you take in class or at work, and it can be an incredible experience "chatting" with what you wrote down. 

Now, Google has teamed up researchers and publications like the Economist and the Atlantic to effectively offer a similar idea, but in a public way. As TechCrunch reports, people will now be able to read original source material in these notebooks, including Shakespeare, but also "ask questions, explore topics, and get answers that include citations."

This builds on a lesson that many companies have already learned about AI: putting limitations around the technology or specifically, forcing it to focus on a set group of documents and facts, can create a better experience and something that’s more reliable when seeking questions. For companies, this shows up in chatbots that have been designed to answer policy questions for employees. Now, Google appears to be trying a similar idea for research knowledge, and news archives.

Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of the Atlantic, said in a statement printed by Google that he believed NotebookLM was a next step in storytelling and information sharing. "The books of the future won’t just be static," he said. "Some will talk to you, some will evolve with you, and some will exist in forms we can’t imagine now."

AI isn't coming for all our jobs

Economists have warned for a long time that AI and automation could have a significant impact on jobs, but now that it’s happening, new research is showing other factors may also be to blame. Researchers in the UK say rising wage costs and interest rates are also playing a role in falling job market numbers.

"Unprecedented uncertainty from geopolitical tensions, higher interest rates to curb inflation, cautious households saving more and consuming less, tighter public finances, and rising employee costs are all contributing to a slower pace of recruitment," researchers from McKinsey and Company recently wrote.

The researchers also noted that even though AI is being broadly used across the world's largest companies, "broad-based productivity improvements remain elusive to date."

"Only around 20% report a tangible impact on enterprise-level earnings," the researchers said. "The tools exist, but integrating them into workflows and changing how people work is proving challenging."

The report adds some nuance to the anxiety many people increasingly share that AI is having an already profound impact on the job market. Some researchers believe, for example, that AI is killing off entry level jobs that new graduates rely on at the beginning of their careers. Executives, meanwhile, have touted how AI can replace large swaths of their employee base, including for administrators and HR.

Claude now works with Canva

Though Microsoft’s Bing, Meta’s AI and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Claude famously have the ability to create images from text prompts, Anthropic’s Claude has until now primarily focused on text. That’s helped Claude Code stand out in the coding world, but it’s also held back the company from offering features others have. Now, Anthropic’s answer may come by way of Canva.

The company said it’s integrating Canva’s popular online design app into its service. You have to have a paid subscription to each service in order to use them, but if you do, it appears rather easy.

This connection is happening through MCP, model context protocol, a technology designed for AI’s to connect and share information with one another.

Companies like Microsoft are betting big on MCP to become the next connective glue of the internet. 

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Ian Sherr is a widely published journalist who's covered nearly every major tech company from Apple to Netflix, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and more for CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and CNET. Aside from writing, he tinkers with tech at home, is a longtime fencer -- the kind with swords -- and began woodworking during the pandemic.