The battle of artificial intelligence. So Microsoft and Google vie for supremacy

The battleground is the future of AI-powered search engines. And the primacy for now is being fought by two giants like Microsoft and Google. A battle conducted with announcements, advances, acquisitions and billionaire investments.

Microsoft yesterday launched a new version of Bing, its search engine. It will be integrated with ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence unveiled last December and which made the world understand the potential of this technology. Satya Nadella immediately clarified the scope of the announcement: “It is the beginning of a new era for search engines”, began the number one of Microsoft from the headquarters in Redmond.

ChatGPT will allow Bing users to ask everything “naturally”. How to elaborate a text, an image, a personalized menu or a travel itinerary according to your tastes. And it will also do so thanks to a new framework in which to work: a new version of Edge, the Microsoft browser, completely redesigned to allow better use of the new search features. “The real race starts today,” added Nadella. Without adding anything else. But the message was directed precisely to Mountain View.

Google launches Bard, a digital bard

Google 24 hours earlier launched its response to ChatGPT: it’s called Bard, a modern version of the medieval bard, an AI capable of communicating with users, answering their questions and starting a conversation by fishing in the immense baggage of information present on Alphabet’s servers. For now, unlike Microsoft, Google has made Bard available to a small number of “trusted testers.” For now they have kept the maximum confidentiality on what they tested.

Microsoft, on the other hand, immediately aimed at the general public. He impressed network users with the third version of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence developed by OpenAI, a company founded in 2016 by Sam Altman and in which Redmond has already invested 11 billion. The new Bing will have an even more powerful version of ChatGPT. If the previous one showed its ability to compose texts, codes and poems (rhyming, but rather banal), the new one promises to do much more. And to reposition Microsoft in the online search market. Capable of generating advertising revenue of 220 billion in 2022, almost all the prerogative of Google with 93% of searches.

It is no coincidence that of all the innovations presented by Microsoft with the new Bing, all managers have focused on one: the new generation of engines will make the online purchase of products and services much faster. From 2013 to today, Google and Microsoft have invested in dozens of startups that deal with artificial intelligence. From DeepMind to ChatGPT, for a total value exceeding 100 billion. Now the technology is ripe to pay off a decade of financial commitments.