Microsoft and Google kick off the AI-bot race, but their speed comes with concerns
AI of the tiger… Cue the music. The Super Bowl wasn’t the only big competition to play out last week: the AI-chatbot battle officially kicked off. Before getting into it, a quick recap: in November, Microsoft-backed OpenAI launched ChatGPT and it went viral as people used it to answer prompts, write articles, and even craft poems. In January, Microsoft announced plans to integrate OpenAI’s tech into all its products. Then last week, things took an intense turn:
- On Monday Google debuted its ChatGPT rival, Bard — a response to the existential threat posed by OpenAI — and said it’ll soon integrate Bard into web search.
- On Tuesday, in a last-minute news event announced on Monday, Microsoft introduced a ChatGPT-fueled version of its Bing search engine and an AI-supported Edge browser.
- Then on Wednesday, Google held its own news event to show off its Bard chatbot, but the stock tumbled after a video promo contained the wrong answer to a query.
Well, that escalated quickly… The launch of ChatGPT triggered an AI battle between search giant Google and software titan Microsoft, and it could get more heated than their cloud rivalry. Google’s been in the AI game for years (it invented the “transformer” tech that powers ChatGPT). But it’s historically been more cautious with rolling out these lightly tested tools to the public, since there are still significant unknowns. But…
- Google apparently felt pressured to introduce Bard earlier than planned to protect its profit-puppy search biz.
- Microsoft apparently felt pressured to invest billions in OpenAI and attach its powerful tools to its product suite.
Getting there first can be a dangerous game… because competition makes it harder to move cautiously. Now two tech titans with massive reach are racing to crank out genAI features even though concerns abound. Large language models have been known to share false information and biased answers, and have well-documented tendencies to spew out hate speech. Also on the line: the intellectual output of future generations, which could become monotonous.