The software stalwartâs big investment in AI could make it cutting-edge again.
Two decades ago, Google edged out Microsoft with the worldâs most popular
search engine. Microsoft now wants to win the AI race.
Sara Morrison is a senior Vox reporter who covers data privacy, antitrust, and
Big Techâs power over us all.
Microsoft appears to be on the cusp of being something it hasnât been in a
long time: cutting-edge. Itâs a label the company lost a long time ago after
a series of small startups grew to become Microsoftâs biggest competitors.
Google, for example, started out as a nimble, innovative upstart and eventually
bested Microsoft in browsers, email, and mobile operating systems. But now
Microsoft might be the nimble, innovative company that bests Google in
artificial intelligence. And itâs all thanks to OpenAI.
OpenAI is the hottest AI lab out there with one of the buzziest and most
exciting products: ChatGPT. And Microsoft is its very good friend. On Monday,
the two companies announced that Microsoft was investing $10 billion into
OpenAI (thatâs on top of the $3 billion Microsoft has given OpenAI since
2019), and Microsoft is rumored to be adding ChatGPT to its Bing search engine.
Yeah, thatâs right: The much-maligned, little-used Bing might finally become
a real competitor to Googleâs search.
Following the news of Microsoftâs $10 billion investment, Wedbush analyst
Daniel Ives wrote that ChatGPT is a âpotential game changerâ for Microsoft,
and that the company was ânot going to repeat the same mistakesâ of missing
out on social and mobile that it made two decades ago. Microsoft âis clearly
being aggressive on this front and not going to be left behind,â Ives wrote.
There are parallels here, at least on the surface. Microsoft was once the
dominant player in computer technology, with its Windows operating system being
used by the vast majority of personal computers and its Internet Explorer
browser being used by the vast majority of web surfers. And then it got in
trouble with the US government, which sued Microsoft for using its dominant
position to unfairly drive out competition and take over the then-nascent
browser market by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. The lawsuit tied up
Microsoft for years. In that environment, companies like Google emerged,
putting out better products that people preferred in an exponentially growing
market.
Microsoft still did just fine â it remains one of the most valuable companies
in the world and is still more valuable than Google â but it doesnât have
the same consumer-facing cachet it did before. Its enterprise clients drive the
vast majority of its revenue, through products like Microsoft 365 and Azure.
Google, by contrast, is very visible to and much-used by the general consumer,
owning everything from Chrome to Gmail to YouTube. Its main revenue source is
the digital ads that consumers see as they navigate the internet, and the
majority of them are using Google services while they do it.
But now Google is the company thatâs having antitrust issues, facing multiple
lawsuits from the federal government and almost every state and territory in
the country that target core parts of its business, including one that was
filed just yesterday. Those may well clear the way for Microsoft to be the
leader in a burgeoning industry with a ton of potential: AI. Companies like
OpenAI have made significant advancements in the technology and are now showing
it off to the general public, while Googleâs competing products are
practically nowhere to be found beyond updates on Googleâs blog. (Microsoft
isnât entirely in the clear, as the Federal Trade Commission is currently
trying to block its massive merger with the gaming company Activision Blizzard,
but itâs in a much better position, antitrust-wise.)
Thatâs not to say that Google doesnât recognize AIâs potential and
increasing importance. Itâs been working on AI offerings for years, and has
some of the best ones. It acquired the AI research lab DeepMind in 2014, before
OpenAI even existed. And it developed the Transformer technology that ChatGPT
is built on (GPT stands for Generative Prediction Transformer).
But Google has held back on giving them the kind of public demonstration that
OpenAI has, saying it wants to ensure that its products are responsible and
safe before unleashing them. Not helping matters was a claim from a
(now-former) engineer that Googleâs chatbot technology, LaMDA, had become
sentient. Thatâs been widely dismissed (and denied by Google), but it
underlined how advanced the technology has become. And it showed the risks not
of the technology becoming sentient, but of it being so good that people would
think it was and start to treat it as such.
Now that ChatGPT is out there, Google has to play catch-up and figure out how
it wants to integrate its AI technology into its own offerings. Itâs even,
reportedly, brought back founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to help out. The
company also recently published a paper outlining its approach to AI and how
important it is for that approach to be responsible (or Googleâs definition
of responsible, given the lack of government regulations).
âGoogle is, I think, justified and correct in taking this seriously and
taking Microsoftâs bid to use this tech to seriously compete with them in
advertising, search engines, and other products,â said Derek Leben, a
professor at Carnegie Mellonâs business school who focuses on AI ethics. âI
think this is a very brilliant move from [Microsoft CEO] Satya Nadella. This is
something that is definitely going to position Microsoft very well.â
But, Leben warned, there remains the question of whether the benefits of these
products outweigh their risks â and if rushing them to market to compete will
enhance those risks.
âThat is indeed the problem with arms races,â he said. âThey tend to
motivate actors in them to move faster, and accept risks that they otherwise
would not have accepted.â
Maybe OpenAIâs technology is a game changer. Maybe itâs just a party trick.
Either way, Microsoftâs got it, and a lot of people think itâs amazing.
That perception is important. Google now finds itself in a similar position
that it helped put Microsoft in two decades ago: hoping it can release
something better before it gets passed by.
This story was first published in the Recode newsletter.
===========================================================
The fb-exchange mailing list
Manage account,
List Page: https://www.freelists.org/list/fb-exchange
Archive: https://www.freelists.org/archive/fb-exchange
To unsubscribe: log onto the List page and select "Unsubscribe".
Administrative contact: insight@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
===========================================================