The Refresh News: May 5 - Bots, and Big Tech Earnings

AI and earnings took center stage this week. Perplexity’s building a browser, OpenAI wants to be your shopping assistant, and Big Tech dropped their Q1 numbers.

We cover:

• Perplexity builds a browser – CEO Aravind Srinivas explains how Comet aims to work at the operating system level, enabling actions like scraping pages, taking actions on your behalf, and improving ad targeting with granular user data.
• Hardware partnerships fuel expansion – Perplexity will be pre-installed on new Motorola Razrs and is in talks with Samsung. This move mirrors Google’s own bundling tactics… just as Google faces antitrust heat.
• OpenAI launches shoppable search – You can now shop directly within ChatGPT results, with comparisons, recommendations, and product discovery baked into the interface. Shopify integration is rumored, but no ads—for now.
• The web is changing – In this new model, websites aren’t for browsing. They’re for bots to scrape, analyze, and feed insights back to the user in one seamless chat interface.
• Apple earnings – $95.4B in revenue, beating expectations. Hardware ticked up slightly, but services brought in $26.65B, growing 11.65% YoY.
• Meta earnings – $42.3B revenue (+16%), driven by ads. Ad impressions rose 5%, pricing jumped 10%. Meta boosted AI capex projections to $64–$72B.
• Alphabet earnings – $90.2B in revenue (+12%), strong performance in search. YouTube ads slightly missed projections. Tariff pressures are hitting Google Shopping spend.
• Amazon earnings – $29.3B in ad revenue, right on target, but a gloomy Q2 forecast due to tariffs and consumer uncertainty dragged stock down 4%.
• Microsoft earnings – $70B revenue (+13%), thanks to resilient software and cloud services. Hardware may take a hit, but they’re better positioned than most to handle turbulence.

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