Google and Microsoft at active war once again, this time over AI

There is no doubt that it was only a matter of time before the major tech corporations like Amazon, Meta, Apple, Google, or Microsoft began to see their investments in artificial intelligence come to fruition. This week, we've already seen this come to life with two significant announcements from Google and Microsoft, just days apart. This marks the beginning of a new competition between the tech giants to become the leader in the field of AI.

On Monday, February 6, Google officially announced Bard, its answer to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Google has dusted off its language generation technology LaMDA to shape its new conversational AI service, which main idea is to generate information in response to search queries in a more creative, direct and personalized way. At an event held on February 8, the company provided more information about Bard's focus on improving the tools they already offer through AI. Some of the features we can expect relatively soon are:

• If a search query doesn't have a clear answer, Bard will generate one based on available data, similar to ChatGPT, but emphasized that this is not necessarily a correct answer but rather a possible guide to help "quickly understand the big picture and explore different angles."
• Multisearch, a tool that allows users to start a search using an image and text, is now globally available on mobile devices where Google Lens is.
• Immersive View in Google Maps, which shows 3D views of an area with traffic and weather information.
• New features have been added to assist EV drivers, including suggestions for charge stops, a filter for fast charging stations with 150kW or higher, and indication of locations with chargers in search results.
• An AR feature in Google Lens that blends translated text into images.

In addition to other features with undefined arrival dates, which will improve several existing tools such as Search, Maps, and Translate, Google also gave a first look at Bard, which essentially operates and looks similarly to ChatGPT, with a search bar for asking questions and a chatbot that generates answers. However, it should be noted that answers generated by Bard, like other AI services, are not always entirely correct, as demonstrated by some users during a demo. Currently, Bard is only available for closed testing to a limited number of users, and it is unknown when it will be released to the general public.

But as we mentioned at the beginning, Google was not the only one to take a step forward, Microsoft also did its thing and during a press event announced that the new generation of ChatGPT will be integrated into their web browser Edge and their search engine Bing. This could change Bing's fortunes, which with a market share of 9% worldwide today, has been overshadowed by Google pretty much since its existence, but that could start to change very soon.

The new Bing, integrated with the upgraded version of OpenAI's GPT 3.5 language model, will offer better results and a chat experience with the ability to generate content, referred to as "AI copilot for the web." Bing will offer a side-by-side results experience with AI annotations as you navigate through conventional search results, but it will also offer you the possibility of talking to the chatbot and interact with it, pretty much like ChatGPT does today, but unlike the latter, Bing can give you information about recent events or news, since it feeds information on the web in real time. On top of that, Microsoft is launching two new AI-enhanced features for its Edge browser: “chat” and “compose", embedded within Edge’s sidebar. The Chat feature will allow users to use the chatbot to search and ask the AI about the content they are looking at on a website or file, while the Compose feature will allow the user to ask Edge to create new content based on this information, such as a LinkedIn post. This will be interesting to see as Edge will be able to understand the website we are on and work intelligently with this information. There is currently a waitlist where you can sign up in case you want to try the new Bing's features as soon as possible while Microsoft roll out the public version.

This year is likely to see a change in the way we interact on the web, as other big names such as Alibaba are also working on their own alternatives to ChatGPT. Regardless of who implements the technology better, it's clear that AI is here to stay and will impact the way we use the web.