The language model battle reignites old animosities
This week two Big Tech behemoths, Microsoft and Google, locked horns in the first skirmish in what both clearly think will be the battle to control the next evolutionary era of technology: artificial intelligence (AI).
The Microsoft of today makes for an interesting study: having survived the regulatory and judicial assaults of the 1990s, the company has reinvented itself, both in its actual business model as well in the public imagination.
A large part of this is due to having failed: Internet search proved an elusive market for Microsoft, and it was thoroughly trounced in mobile technology despite having every opportunity to succeed. As a result, both governments and the public at large seem to have lost interest in it as a potential monopolist. At the same time, by throwing its weight wholeheartedly behind cloud, leveraging its inroads into enterprise IT in the process, today’s friendlier, non-monopolist Microsoft has actually achieved a tighter grip on its customers – and this time they’re hooked in to a subscription model.
Google, for its part, has long since lost its lustre. No longer widely viewed as the cool or ethical technology company, it is now a kind of Internet utility that we begrudgingly use. The good news for Google is that it lost the unwanted crown of being seen as the Internet’s chief terrifying data thief to Facebook. The bad is that none of its internally-developed products beyond search, advertising and the, frankly, hardly novel idea of Web-based mail, have been a success.
Little wonder, then, that Google has been pointing its money firehose at AI for some years, banking on it as not only the next big thing, but as a thing that is actually relevant to its core business.
It must sting a bit, then, that it has been pipped at the post by Microsoft, whose investment in OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT, has rapidly been parlayed into a new front in internet search. With Microsoft’s tanks on its lawn, Google has now responded by announcing Bard, its own large language model (LLM) AI, which, despite a slip up this week (one that, temporarily anyway, wiped $140 billion (approx. €130 billion) off the company’s total value), will doubtlessly give ChatGPT a run for its money.
Both companies have clearly telegraphed that they see search as the obvious use for LLM AIs, helping to assist with user queries. Suddenly, the search wars of the 1990s and 2000s have been reignited.
What about us, the poor public? Will we see the fruit of this tremendous technological investment? Maybe. It’s not as though competing websites will lead to a format war given that typing into a box on a website makes no demands of us, capital or otherwise. It seems unlikely that search will be fixed, though. The Web will continue to degenerate into complete nonsense, aided and assisted by AI, and as a result driving us to each inhabit ever-narrower tranches of the online world. In that context, it would be fanciful to believe that AI will be the tool that finally separates the wheat from the chaff.
The battle between Redmond and Mountain View is likely to prove entertaining, though.
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