Cyrus Mewawalla, director of thematic insights at GlobalData, calls AI a big topic for 2023. “Microsoft has stolen Google’s lead” with its investment in OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, he notes.
“Microsoft is winning the AI race,” the expert told CNBC’s Squawk Box Europe.
ChatGPT is a popular AI chatbot that is trained on massive amounts of data to provide feedback to users. Microsoft has announced that it will integrate ChatGPT into several cloud computing products.
Google, meanwhile, has been working on AI for years. It acquired British AI startup Deepmind in 2014. Last week, Alphabet merged Google Research’s Brain division with DeepMind to consolidate its AI efforts. But Mewawalla said it should have been done a long time ago. Despite Google’s strong AI capabilities, it fell behind Microsoft last year.
“In 2022, Google had a ‘Kodak moment.’ They had a flagship product but kept it to one side because they were afraid it would cannibalize their core business. Today, their core business is under serious threat,” he said.
Internet search is a big deal for Google. Microsoft has incorporated OpenAI’s technology into its Bing search engine. The “Kodak moment” is often used to describe a failure to see the future. Eastman Kodak Company failed to transition to the digital age.
In response to Microsoft, Google launched its own chatbot Bard AI and began testing it with users. CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the AI technology behind Bard will be brought to the search engine in the near future.
Experts say that while Google’s AI technology is great, the company is not putting it into products as quickly as Microsoft. According to Richard Kramer, a senior analyst at Arete Research, Google’s problem is that while they have the best minds and hundreds of leading AI researchers, they are not making products out of what they have done.
But some analysts see Alphabet’s multi-year investment in AI as a long-term advantage. In a report, JPMorgan predicted that the company will accelerate its efforts to commercialize the technology behind AI chatbots, known as large language models (LLMs). Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat said that capital expenditures will increase this year compared to 2022, and AI is a key component.
Alphabet is integrating AI into a variety of products, CEO Pichai said, comparing the opportunity AI presents to the shift from desktop to mobile computing a decade ago.
(According to CNBC)
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