Google is Scrambling to Catch Up to Bing, of All Things
upstart writes:
Google bookended Microsoft's big AI search announcement with underwhelming AI news of its own:
Microsoft has officially taken the lead in the race to build a search engine powered by generative AI. On Tuesday, the company debuted the rumored OpenAI-infused versions of its Bing search engine and Edge web browser, proclaiming them to be the next evolution of the internet - an evolution that so far seems to be crafted by Microsoft. Not Google. And Google seems increasingly concerned about that.
Google has spent the last two decades as the most popular search engine in the world. Search is also Google's biggest revenue stream, thanks to all the ads it places all over search results. So it's unusual to see the company scrambling when it comes to what's always been its bread and butter. Yet, that seems to be exactly what Google is doing in response to Microsoft's plans to integrate AI into Bing, its own search engine, which seem to be further along than Google's. After Microsoft invited journalists to see its new AI products last week, Google scrambled to make announcements and show off demos of its own. In other words, Google, which long since surpassed Microsoft's search and web browsing tools, is now playing catch-up.
[...] Bard and the new Bing seem pretty similar on the surface. But it's hard to say without trying them, and neither is available to the general public yet. They're both rolling out in the next few weeks. But while Bard is built on a "lightweight" version of its generative chatbot for now, Microsoft says the new Bing will use an even more powerful version of ChatGPT that was custom-designed for search. And while Bard was introduced in a short blog post, Microsoft invited a ton of journalists to a splashy live event at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, to show off its AI-powered Bing and Edge. This all suggests that one company thinks its AI search is ready for primetime, while the other is just trying not to be left out of the conversation completely.
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