Samsung Elec Expects $100 Mln or More Sales from Advanced Chip Packaging Business 

A flag bearing the logo of Samsung flutters in front of its office building in Seoul, South Korea, October 25, 2020. (Reuters)
A flag bearing the logo of Samsung flutters in front of its office building in Seoul, South Korea, October 25, 2020. (Reuters)
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Samsung Elec Expects $100 Mln or More Sales from Advanced Chip Packaging Business 

A flag bearing the logo of Samsung flutters in front of its office building in Seoul, South Korea, October 25, 2020. (Reuters)
A flag bearing the logo of Samsung flutters in front of its office building in Seoul, South Korea, October 25, 2020. (Reuters)

Samsung Electronics expects $100 million or more of revenue from its next batch of advanced chip-packaging products this year, co-CEO Kye-Hyun Kyung said on Wednesday.

Samsung set up advanced chip packaging as a business unit last year, and Kyung said he expects the results of Samsung's investment to come out in earnest from the second half of this year.

Kyung's remarks were made during Samsung's annual general shareholders' meeting.

Samsung's memory chip business seeks to achieve a greater profit share than its market share this year, Kyung said.

Samsung's market share in DRAM chips, used in tech devices, reached 45.5% in the fourth quarter last year, according to data provider TrendForce.

To do this, Samsung seeks to secure a competitive advantage in high-end memory chips required by booming artificial intelligence demand, including mass producing a 12-stack version of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips called HBM3E.

For a future generation of HBM chips called HBM4, likely to be released in 2025 with more customized designs, Samsung will take advantage of having memory chips, chip contract manufacturing and chip design businesses under one roof to satisfy customer needs, Kyung said.

Answering a shareholder question on Samsung's recent setback in the current HBM market compared to rival SK Hynix , Kyung said: "We're better prepared to prevent that from happening again in the future."

Samsung Electronics shares rose as much as 6.04% on Wednesday, and are set for their highest one-day jump since early September after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the AI semiconductor leader is qualifying Samsung's HBM chips for use.

Samsung expects tangible results soon from other memory products being developed for use in AI, including compute express link (CXL) and processing-in-memory (PIM) products, Kyung added.



OpenAI Enters Google-Dominated Search Market with SearchGPT 

OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)
OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)
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OpenAI Enters Google-Dominated Search Market with SearchGPT 

OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)
OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. (Reuters)

OpenAI is venturing into a territory long dominated by Google with the selective launch of SearchGPT, an artificial intelligence-powered search engine with real-time access to information from the internet.

The move, announced on Thursday, also places the AI giant in competition with its largest backer Microsoft's Bing search and emerging services such as Perplexity — a search-focused AI chatbot firm backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and semiconductor giant Nvidia.

Shares of Google's parent company Alphabet ended 3% lower on Thursday after OpenAI's announcement.

OpenAI said it has opened sign-ups for the new tool, which is currently in the prototype stage and is being tested with a small group of users and publishers. The company plans to integrate the best features from the search tool into ChatGPT in the future.

"AI-powered search tools from OpenAI and Perplexity re-affirm search as a content engagement model but pressure Google to be better at its own game," Canaccord Genuity analyst Kingsley Crane said.

Google dominates the search engine market with a 91.1% share as of June, according to web analytics firm Statcounter.

SearchGPT will provide summarized search results with source links in response to user queries, OpenAI said in a blog post. Users will also be able to ask follow-up questions and receive contextual responses.

The company will give publishers access to tools for managing how their content appears in SearchGPT results. News Corp and The Atlantic are publishing partners for SearchGPT.

SearchGPT signals a closer collaboration between publishers and OpenAI, following content licensing agreements with major organizations like Associated Press, News Corp and Axel Springer.

"Newer AI-powered search providers could face challenges of their own, with Perplexity already facing pending legal action from publishers like Wired and Forbes, and Condé Nast," said Crane.

Major search engines have been trying to integrate AI into search since ChatGPT first launched in November 2022. Microsoft, through its early investment, adopted OpenAI technology for its Bing search engine, while Google rolled out AI-powered summaries for the wider public at its developer conference in May.

Google did not respond to a Reuters query on the potential impact of SearchGPT on its business.

Reuters had earlier reported on OpenAI's plans around AI search in May.