Google enters the AI race

From my archive, written 11 February 2023. These are my impressions at the time.

Google has finally released a statement on its ChatGPT competitor: Bard, what a shit name, fucking Bard. I in fact used ChatGPT to summarise their article they released, basically, they’re working with another company called DeepMind to develop this, they have history of using AI to improve searches etc and everything else just seems like a puff piece to me, about their mission and crap like that. I hope they can do well, I expect them to, being such a big company and I will be critical of their “Bard” when it comes out.

I wanted to mention the video I watched on ChatGPT, it explained behind the scenes of it and its relation to Microsoft a lot more, It began with mentioning that it took 2 months for ChatGPT to gain 100 million users and that things that are disruptive usually gain users fast like this. I didn’t even know this, but Microsoft and ChatGPT have been working very closely together, Microsoft initially invested $1 billion into OpenAI, allowing them access to Microsoft software to help scale ChatGPT and in return gain access to what OpenAI would create.

The video then explains that this will revolutionise the way we gain access to information, before, if we wanted answers to a specific question, we had to go through advertisement, irrelevant links and even then we may not get an exact answer to our question (Microsoft found that 44% of search queries go unanswered) whereas now, we can ask specific questions, with immediate answers. The AI is the one to have gone through all the links before, it knows all variations to the question and so can answer them with no trouble.

In the future, Microsoft is going to invest $10 billion more into ChatGPT and receive 75% of its profit, then holding a 50% stake, they’ve possibly struck gold and they’re not letting go. Google on the other hand have invested $400 million into a ChatGPT competitor Anthropic.