A year ago, the tech industry’s prospects looked bleak. Google’s profit dropped. Shares of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, were in free fall. Business growth at Amazon had slowed to its lowest level in two decades.But what looked like an industrywide bust appears to have been more of a correction. The most recent quarter was surprisingly strong for tech’s biggest companies. Meta’s and Google’s ad businesses rebounded. Microsoft’s cloud computing business continued to expand. So did Amazon’s e-commerce business. Apple, with a 1 percent decline, was the only big tech company whose revenue dropped.Still, the slump exposed a weakness: The world’s largest tech companies hadn’t developed a big new idea in years. Despite pouring money into self-driving cars, the metaverse and quantum computers, the businesses still relied on digital ad sales, iPhones and cloud computing.Now the companies are hoping that artificial intelligence will be the answer to the problem and a way to refresh aging product lines that haven’t changed all that much in recent years. They have plans to invest billions in generative A.I. technology, which powers chatbots like ChatGPT.While making serious money from new A.I. products is still a ways off, a quick return to form has given the companies plenty of room to experiment.In a call with investors on Thursday, Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, said work on generative A.I. was still in earl …
