Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Here's your afternoon TNB Tech Minute for Monday, January 12th. I'm Anthony Bansi for The Wall Street Journal. Google's parent company Alphabet's value topped $4 trillion in intraday trading. It's the latest tech company to cross the threshold as investors continue to reward the Internet search leader for its artificial intelligence gains.
Google pulled well ahead in the race to develop AI with the recent launch of its Gemini 3 model, which earned praise for its speed, intelligence, and creative capabilities, and outperformed competing models on more than a dozen benchmark tests. Only three other tech companies have traded at market capitalizations of $4 trillion, Apple, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.
Only NVIDIA is still trading above that mark.
Chapter 2: What recent milestone did Alphabet achieve in the tech industry?
Sticking with Google, Apple announced today that it selected Google's Gemini to power a more personalized version of its Siri chatbot. Apple has struggled to develop AI tools of its own, and Siri's capabilities badly lag behind other chatbots available from competitors. Apple said it had entered a multi-year collaboration with Google to use Gemini as its foundation of its own AI models.
The Gemini-powered Siri is expected to launch later this year. And Meta has appointed former Trump advisor Dina Powell McCormick as president and vice chair. The company says Powell McCormick will help guide Meta's overall strategy and execution, and she's expecting to work on its compute and infrastructure teams on multibillion-dollar investments.
She is serving in a newly created role and will report to Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Powell McCormick's appointment also comes as Meta continues to try to deepen its ties with the current administration. And that's it for your TNB Tech Minute. For a deeper dive into what's happening in tech, check out tomorrow's Tech News Briefing podcast.