formidable competitor
Alphabet is coming off a disappointing fourth quarter as advertisers cut spending.
The search and advertising giant is moving quickly to keep pace with OpenAI and rivals, reportedly bringing on founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to accelerate its efforts.
“People are starting to question whether Microsoft is now going to be a formidable competitor against Google’s really bread-and-butter business,” said King Lipp, chief strategist at Baker Avenue Wealth Management.
Lip cautioned, however, that concerns about Alphabet may be overstated, saying: “I think Bing is still a long way from Google’s search capabilities.”
The new ChatGPT software has sparked excitement among technology firms after thousands of job cuts in recent weeks and executives pledging to work on so-called moonshot projects. AI has become a fixation for tech executives, who mentioned it six times more often on recent earnings calls than in previous quarters, Reuters found.
The appeal of AI-powered search is that it can produce results in plain language rather than a list of links, which can make browsing faster and more efficient. It’s unclear what impact this might have on targeted advertising, the backbone of search engines like Google.
Chatbot AI systems also pose a risk to corporations due to inherent biases in their algorithms that can skew results, sexualize images or even steal them, as consumers who have tested the service have discovered. For example, Microsoft released a chatbot on Twitter in 2016 that quickly began generating racist content before being shut down. And the AI used by the news site CNET was found to produce factually incorrect or plagiarized stories.
At the time of writing, Bard’s ad had been viewed over a million times on Twitter.
