Google's New AI Features Fuel Race With Microsoft

"PARIS -- Google unveiled new artificial intelligence-powered search and map features on Wednesday, capping a flurry of competing announcements by the search giant and rival Microsoft Corp. as they race to bring a new generation of the technology to users.

The back-to-back announcements from two of the tech industry's fiercest competitors are the latest signs of how companies are scrambling to roll out tools that use a type of artificial intelligence that can generate content -- from haikus to computer code -- and capitalize on a wave of renewed excitement about the potential of AI among businesses and consumers.

At an event in the French capital Wednesday, the Alphabet Inc. unit showed a series of AI enhancements for its search engine, including plans to start generating lengthy textual responses to complex queries with no single correct answer -- such as what are the best constellations to look for when stargazing. That came after Google offered a glimpse, Monday, of a homegrown rival to the popular ChatGPT chatbot that it calls Bard -- and inadvertently demonstrated the trickiness of such tools when a screen capture of a Bard answer included an apparent factual error.

In between the Google announcements, Microsoft on Tuesday showed off its plans to incorporate the generative AI technology behind ChatGPT into its Bing search engine. It demonstrated how it can process natural-language queries to generate answers and suggestions using information like news stories, train schedules and product pricing.

"We're grounded in the fact that Google dominates this space," Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella said in an interview, referring to a business where Google has more than 90% market share and generated $162 billion in revenue last year, more than half of Alphabet's total. "All I need is a few more users, and someone else that I'm competing [with] has to keep all of their users and all of their gross margin."

Alphabet shares fell 7.4% to $100 on Wednesday, while Microsoft's fell 0.3% to $266.73, on an overall down day for stocks.

"Google has a lot more to lose than gain from rushing Gen-AI out the door," wrote Colin Sebastian, a senior research analyst at Baird Equity Research. "Microsoft is taking a big leap, integrating OpenAI technology with Bing, a smart move for a search engine with limited share -- how could Bing not gain search share?"

Google again emphasized Wednesday that it already bakes AI into its search results, for instance by helping the search engine understand natural-language queries to give better results. It also said it would be releasing more new AI products as soon as it was satisfied they would meet its standards.

"We have a lot of hard and exciting work ahead to build these technologies into our products and continue bringing the best of Google AI to improve people's lives," Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said Monday in an internal company email viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The tit-for-tat developments are part of a fast-spreading war over the commercial potential of generative AI, which can create content in response to short user inputs, since OpenAI moved to release ChatGPT publicly late last year. Microsoft has promised to integrate capabilities from generative AI tools from OpenAI across all of its products quickly, as well as making them available to outside developers.

Others are jumping into the fray. China's Baidu Inc. is developing an AI-powered chatbot similar to ChatGPT called "Ernie bot," which it plans to launch next month.

The race is forcing Google -- by far the most widely used search engine -- into an unusual position of playing catch-up to a company whose search engine is an also-ran in traffic terms.

Google gave an additional glimpse Wednesday of its experimental conversational AI chatbot, Bard, which it made available this week to outside testers. A brief demonstration showed how a user could use Bard to suggest criteria to consider when trying to buy a new car, or places to visit for a scenic road trip.

Google also gave more detail about how it plans to integrate generative AI into search results by focusing on what it calls "no one right answer" queries, which the company refers to as NORA. In a demonstration, the company showed how such a query might generate a bullet-point list, and below it some pre-formatted questions to elicit further information.

Another feature Google announced Wednesday will expand users' ability to query the search engine based on images and videos they are looking at on their phones if they use Google's Android operating system, allowing a user to identify, say, a local landmark.

The company also is rolling out a feature that allows Google Maps users to explore three-dimensional representations of destinations -- like the inside of a restaurant -- extrapolated by AI from ordinary two-dimensional photos. And it said it is broadening the availability of a feature that lets users search maps for local businesses by pointing their phone at the nearby area.

Technology investors and analysts, as well as some company staffers, have complained that Google hasn't released more AI products despite its research being at the core of some of the new technologies now generating public excitement.

In part, according to Google executives, that is because the company has been reluctant to roll out tools that, like ChatGPT, can sometimes spout false information or nonsense in response to user queries. The company also has been under scrutiny by researchers, regulators and its own staffers to police its own use of AI.

Google's new Bard system appeared to fall victim to that pitfall Monday when an example the company posted of its responses claimed that the James Webb Space Telescope took "the very first pictures" of an exoplanet outside the solar system. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration says on its website that the first images of an exoplanet were taken as early as 2004 by a different telescope.

"It's a good example [of] the need for rigorous testing," Elizabeth Reid, Google's vice president and general manager of search, said Wednesday, adding that the example was nuanced.

The company declined to give a precise date for Bard's public launch, or the new chat-based responses to NORA search queries, but said it is conducting tests to make sure they deliver accurate information. "The real bottleneck for us is to get to a place where we can get the quality where we want it to be," said Prabhakar Raghavan, a Google senior vice president." [1]

1. Google's New AI Features Fuel Race With Microsoft
Schechner, Sam; Kruppa, Miles.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 09 Feb 2023: A.1.