DEEP DIVE: Who Will Win the AI Search Arms Race?

This week, both Microsoft and Google made announcements touting their artificial intelligence (AI) prowess and plans as they battle to dominate the nascent AI niche, which some believe will be as important as the iPhone or cloud computing. Of course, they’re not alone. Venture capitalists poured money into the more than 75 startups, by some counts, that aspire to conquer the hot area.

Let’s look at what some of the leading players in AI are doing (and what some nefarious actors are undoing):

(1) Using AI to boost Bing. Microsoft plans to use AI across many of its products, starting with the paid search market. Its Bing search engine has been a perennial also-ran in the Google-dominated space; Bing’s 5% market share compares with Google’s 75%. But now, Microsoft hopes it can win users by infusing Bing with ChatGPT’s AI. Microsoft invested $1 billion in ChatGPT in 2019 and reportedly another $10 billion earlier this year.

The WSJ’s Joanna Stern wrote a positive article about Bing’s new ChatGPT-powered capabilities and noted that she has started using ChatGPT to generate ideas for interview questions, emails, columns and video scripts. “This is going to help us do our jobs better, reduce some of the drudgery,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told her. “I think we need a productivity boost.”