By Hussameddine Al Attar | Staff Writer
Google has had its fair share of limelight following an unprecedented announcement by Microsoft, which some believe has started the biggest tech feud of the decade. At a press event on February 7th, Microsoft unveiled its plans for the future of internet searching: the integration of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model into Bing, fusing the traditional search service with a ChatGPT-like experience. For the first time in the company’s history, Google is shaken to its core. Microsoft has officially taken aim at Google’s largest source of revenue: Google Search.
Microsoft’s new Bing plans to foundationally change the mechanism of information search. Currently, when users cannot find the answer they are looking for in the first few links that appear–the ones that aren’t sponsored, that is–, they must rephrase the question in a more specific manner, and begin their search again. They repeat this process until they find their answer or eventually give up. With GPT-4, Bing brings this often Sisyphean struggle to an end. Users will simply ask their question in as specific or broad a manner as they choose, and they can later drill into the details to their liking without having to start from scratch, as the language model can retain the conversation context extremely well. Bing can also summarise pages worth of documents, retrieve information from outside links at astounding speed, and even compare the information in a table format. While this is great for users who don’t want to spend otherwise useful time reading through documents and scouring the web for answers, this is terrifying for Google. Fewer searches and website visits means fewer ads are seen. Fewer ads means less money in Google’s most profitable sector.
Panicked, Google issued a press conference the next day and announced its own AI language model, Bard, that maybe should have remained unannounced for the time being. Enthusiasts were quick to discover a mistake the model had made in its demo: when asked about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Bard had wrongly credited it with capturing the first image of an exoplanet–this had actually been achieved 14 years prior to the telescope’s launch. Due to an uncoordinated press conference, unconvincing presentation, an error in the demo, and unimpressed investors, the shares of Alphabet Inc. – Google’s parent company – have fallen nearly 8%, costing the company over $100 billion in market cap.
Overnight, Google’s monopoly on the search engine business had been fundamentally challenged by Bing, a competitor that controls a mere 3% of the search engine market, compared to Google’s enormous 93% share (gs.statcounter.com, January 2023) and 8.5 billion queries per day. With more and more users already turning to ChatGPT as an alternative to Google Search, it’s no surprise that the company feels threatened by Microsoft’s announcement. In January, Microsoft announced a multibillion dollar investment in OpenAI, and with an AI race underway, one can expect Microsoft to dump as much resources as possible into its project for a chance to finally dethrone Google.
The race is far from over, however, and Microsoft should expect fierce competition in the months and years to come. Google has always been serious about being the default when it comes to search. It has paid Apple billions of dollars over the years to remain the default search engine on its operating systems. Google has everything to lose if the Microsoft-Open AI partnership holds and integrates GPT-4 into more of Microsoft’s services. If Google can recover from the Bard blunder, it still has the potential to maintain its monopoly, but it no longer has the luxury to remain passive.
Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn’t have much to lose but has a lot to prove, and that is what makes the feud so decisive. To convince users to switch over from Google Search to Bing after many years of loyalty, Microsoft will have to present a convincing, polished, and irresistible product; otherwise, no one would bother. But with ChatGPT’s meteoric rise in popularity after it gained over 100 million users over the span of two months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, it wouldn’t be too surprising if Microsoft pulls it off.