This weeks’s Wall Street Journal (paywall) provides us with a glut of information on generative AI. The take-home today seems to be we may be seeing a coming battle between Google and Microsoft in this space, especially as it is deployed in search. Microsoft seems to have the current lead with ChatGPT’s amazing performances, but Google, consistently holding at about ninety percent of the search market, has the long-term advantage. The comments sections are the usual mix of criticism of the technology, praise for the technology, and assertions that this is just another hype bubble—which of course doesn’t also mean that it has no value.
Here are some of the articles.
What Is ChatGPT? What to Know About the AI Chatbot That Will Power Microsoft Bing is a helpful primer that cover basic issues such as how to use ChatGPT, what values it adds and what risks it holds. “Is AI going to replace jobs?* the article asks. Who knows.
In Google Unveils AI Search Features After Early BardRollout, Sam Schechner and Miles Kruppa tell us all about how, following the pre-release of Bard, Google and Microsoft are competing in the AI search engine market, which we probably already knew. Google announced its AI-powered service called Bard and Microsoft is integrating ChatGPT.
In Dan Gallagher’s Microsoft’s Double-Edged Threat to Google, the winning quote in this article compares Google to “a boxing champion knocked back on its heels and trying to regain footing.” Ouch. But the takeaway here is that Microsoft still has a lot of catch-up to do in search: Bing has about 4% of the market, while Google has consistently hover around 90%.
In I Tried Microsoft’s New AI-Powered Bing. Search Will Never Be the Same Joanna Stern is impressed, calling the new ChatGPT-powered Bing “really smart.” She highlights that their system can even respond to queries about current news events, a big improvement from ChatGPT itself, which is currently stuck in 2021. While acknowledging Google’s current dominance, she states it’s too early to declare a winner in the generative AI space (assuming there can be only one).
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