Microsoft and Google are at war on AI. Who will Prevail?

Is Artificial Intelligence the future of technology? Microsoft and Google surely think so, enough to race between each other on who will get there first.

As with every major technological breakthrough, the public is thoroughly divided. Some call the new Artificial Intelligence softwares “hundred billion dollars mistake” while others think of it as this century’s technological revolution.

What’s undeniable is that AI is the new market craze, and two new players are rising for direct competition. Two tech giants, in fact: Microsoft and Google.

The former bought a few weeks ago OpenAI, the company that created outstanding softwares like ChatGPT and DALL-E. Indeed, it can be argued that OpenAI single-handedly started the war for control on artificial intelligence.

The latter just developed the first industry’s competitor: Bard. With Bard, Google is trying to challenge ChatGPT’s dominance over the embryonal AI sector.

Both ChatGPT and Bard are text-based softwares. They are capable of generating any amount of comprehensive and coherent text using just a few prompts of command. I could ask ChatGPT to write me an article about AI and he will provide one in just a few seconds.

In fact, only ChatGPT is currently available to the general public, while Bard is still in a demo phase. Bard is supposed to create simple solutions to complex problems. It can explain a difficult concept of rocket physics in just a few lines or suggest what lunch one should cook given the remaining ingredients in the fridge.

There is no doubt that the two companies will wage war against each other, whether it will be a short or a much longer one. So the question is: who will prevail?

H2 Different strategies

Though the objective of both Google and Microsoft is the same (remove the other from the AI market), their strategies to achieve it are different.

Microsoft bought an already working company with already working softwares. OpenAI was an established firm that showed its immense capabilities in the sector. By acquiring it, we can safely say that Microsoft has a headstart over the competitor.

On the other hand, ChatGPT is not free of issues. It essentially makes stuff up and, for the moment, is not anything more than a toy to play with. Nobody can seriously hope to write an essay using ChatGPT, because chances are that most of what’s written inside is completely fake.

Google, by standing back and watching, can perhaps learn from the technology of ChatGPT and learn something to improve. Bard is still in the development phase and any major issue can be solved without a major crisis.

Bard can seriously dethrone ChatGPT, dragging Microsoft down with it.

All of this, of course, if artificial intelligence is revealed to be the incredible breakthrough some are hoping for. In the last few years, many internet innovations turned out to be useless bubbles. Cryptocurrencies and NFTs are two of the most obvious examples.

Therefore, an outcome that Microsoft and Google must account for is their mutual destruction following the AI war.