The last two weeks in regards to Artificial Intelligence applied have been like the penultimate chapter before the final closure of a series. Too many unexpected things have happened, characters from the past that seemed already forgotten have returned, and there has even been some foul play. But, with the difference, that the war between Microsoft and Google for the future of AI-based chat integration in search engines has only just begun.
Or maybe it only seems so, because their confrontation comes from afar.
Google introduced Bard, its attempt to integrate a ChatGPT-style chatbot into its dominant search engine. It was a somewhat botched presentation, as was the statement from its CEO, Sundar Pichai. And, to make matters worse, it was soon discovered that there were factual errors in the results they offered as examples.
But the worst thing is surely that Google rushed that presentation to try to get one day ahead of what Microsoft had planned, and where its application of the OpenAI large language model (LLM) product would already be seen —whose ties are already total after its huge investments—in Bing; its hitherto nondescript browser and Edge, its best-thought-out but not overly popular Chromium-based browser.
The difference: Google will deploy it cautiously, first in a very closed beta, and Microsoft has already begun to deploy it with a waiting list, revealing the errors that these proposals inevitably have, at least for now; but that even help you gain more impact.
David against Goliath, with the difference that both are Goliath
If it works, and if people adapt to these types of searches, it would undoubtedly be the biggest change in the history of Internet search engines, as we have already discussed here.
The citations to the websites are for now in Bing much less direct, making disciplines such as SEO or elements such as the traffic that many portals and media receive completely in crisis. It would also force us to rethink, and this is the most important thing, the advertising model on the Internet. And Microsoft, willing to break everything in this sector, is already testing.
That Google, a giant in every way, is nervous is evident. Criticism of Pichai is already on the table. Its main source of income is at stake, close to 90% of the total.
In addition to its internal work, Google has also invested $300 million in an AI company, Anthropic, founded by former OpenAI researchers. Anthropic researches AI language models and has created its own ChatGPT rival, named Claude. The Anthropic chatbot isn’t public yet, but we’ll probably see that soon too.
Microsoft, another giant in its own right —probably even bigger than Google now at the beginning of the 2000s—, and with a very powerful reconversion and diversification of its income since the arrival of Nadella, finds itself in another much more advantageous situation: Bing is for them a tiny part of their income (2% so far) that they don’t care about exploiting, testing and breaking, as if it were a kamikaze, if it serves to tickle Google, or more than that, which can’t play it at all.
And they are getting it. In addition, with an air of revenge from the past, since Nadella, before being CEO of Microsoft, was responsible for Bing.
For this reason, it is normal that we are seeing a struggle between a false David and Goliath, with an agile Microsoft that is ahead of time, and a heavy Alphabet with slow feet.
However, this struggle goes back much further than the last weeks and months. In fact, it goes back more than five years, in a game of ideas and patents that also partly explains Google’s obvious resentment.
An escalation between Google and Microsoft that lasts 5 years
To know the comings and goings between these two giants, you have to go back ten years, in what became known as “Scroogled”, when Microsoft was still trying to compete against Google in many more businesses. And yes, he was still fighting for Windows Phone.
A decade ago, Microsoft treated Google like a political adversary, with newspaper ads taking advantage of privacy concerns, a parody video and even anti-Google advertising. At one point, Google went so far as to block a YouTube app developed by Microsoft for Windows Phone. They also clashed over the sudden inoperability of Google Maps on Windows Phone.
It was clear at the time that Google would do anything to stop Microsoft from succeeding in mobile, just as Microsoft would try to stop Google from succeeding with Chromebooks. It was a sticky situation that was only really resolved when Microsoft and Google signed a rare truce in 2015. The pact was apparently forged to avoid legal battles and complaints to regulators and to encourage cooperation.
The truce expired after six years in April 2021, just one month after Google will criticize Microsoft for trying to “break the way the open web works” in a dispute over Australian laws that would force Google to pay news publishers for their content. We haven’t seen that level of animosity between the two companies since the days of Scroogled, and Microsoft was even remarkably silent during the US government’s antitrust lawsuit against Google in 2020, despite being the No. 2 search engine. at that moment.
Now, Google also blames several of its patents and DeepMind research, his center focused on this area, in AI are the ones that have since been used by others, including OpenAI. In Pichai’s words:
Since then (6 years ago) we have continued to invest in AI across the board, and Google AI and DeepMind are advancing the state of the art. Currently, the scale of the largest AI computations is doubling every six months, far exceeding Moore’s Law. At the same time, advanced generative AI and great language models are capturing the imagination of people around the world. In fact, our Transformer research project and field-defining paper in 2017, as well as our significant advances in diffusion modeling, are now the foundation for many of the generative AI applications that are beginning to be seen today.
sundar pichai
There is some resentment in that paragraph.
Microsoft has recently been hinting at the importance of its OpenAI partnership, establishing how important this moment is for the company’s AI ambitions. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, says the company will turn AI models into the next great computing platform.
The key is how well Microsoft integrates OpenAI models into its own applications and services. Microsoft missed the great mobile opportunity. OpenAI could give Microsoft an early advantage in the AI battles to come.
Google, for its part, is facing for the first time in history a train that it may not take properly.