With its new Bing search engine, Microsoft, according to one ex-Google executive, has “thrown down the gauntlet.”
Microsoft unveiled an updated version of Bing on Tuesday that uses fresh artificial intelligence.
With the release of its enhanced version of Bing, Microsoft, according to a former Google executive, “thrown down the gauntlet” on a new age of artificially intelligent online search.
Although it is too soon to predict the winner of the contest between the new AI-enhanced versions of Bing and Google Search, Sridhar Ramaswamy, a former employee of Google’s search advertisements division, told Insider that Microsoft may have an advantage in controlling the AI narrative.
As the CEO of Neeva, a search engine start-up he cofounded, Ramaswamy, a former senior vice president of advertisements and commerce at Google, stated, “I think of it as a little bit of a Sputnik moment for search.” This has a significant impact on the ecology.
It’s unclear whether and how Google will accept this, as well as what it would do for ad revenue, he continued.
On Tuesday, a day after Google revealed plans to integrate AI technology into its own search engine, Microsoft unveiled its AI-enhanced version of Bing.
Google and Microsoft have been in a tight competition to commercialize new AI technologies ever since Microsoft-backed OpenAI released the well-liked ChatGPT conversation bot in November.
Google is “the 800-pound gorilla in search,” according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who also added in an interview with The Verge published on Wednesday: “I hope that, with our innovation, they will surely want to come out and demonstrate that they can dance.
In terms of underlying technology and investment in AI, Ramaswamy told Insider that Google and Microsoft were “ahead of the pack.”
He referred to claims that OpenAI hired Google engineers to work on ChatGPT and said: “Sometimes it is the story that is ahead of the truth.” “All of these can undermine the claim that Google is the best search engine,” he continued.