Tag: Microsoft

Microsoft Ups the Ante on Both Google and Its Partner OpenAI

Microsoft today announced a cluster of upgrades to its Bing-ChatGPT product, including:

  • Eliminating the Bing chat waitlist, which effectively throttled the product’s growth by adding steps to a consumer’s journey.
  • Integrating more visual search results, which will enliven the consumer experience and potentially engage visitors for longer.
  • Adding chat history and persistence, a major differentiation between Bing chat and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and for me anyway, the main reason I didn’t use Bing.
  • Adding more long document summarization, which is another feature that ChatGPT excels at.
  • Adding a platform layer to Bing, so third party developers can integrate in much the same manner as they can with ChatGPT’s plugins, which I’ve both praised and trashed in past posts (praised because of their potential, trashed because the model reminds me of the app store, which is a walled garden nightmare).

Overall, this news strikes me as Microsoft upping the ante not only on Google, which now has even more catching up to do, but also on Microsoft’s own partner OpenAI, which until now had a superior product. I’m on the road and not able to write as much as I’d like on this, but it’s worth noting. I’m sure the product managers in Mountain View aren’t getting much sleep these days – the pressure is mounting for Google to respond. And in OpenAI headquarters, the frustration has to be building as well – they cut that deal with Microsoft, and now have to live with its terms.

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AI Sausage-Making and Unconsidered Consequences

Is that an AI in your sausage?

Once again, Google and Microsoft are battling for the AI spotlight – this time with news around their offerings for developers and the enterprise*. These are decidedly less sexy markets – you won’t find breathless reports about the death of Google search this time around –  but they’re far more consequential, given their potential reach across the entire technology ecosystem.

Highlighting that consequence is Casey Newton’s recent scoop detailing layoffs impacting Microsoft’s “entire ethics and society team within the artificial intelligence organization.” This team was responsible for thinking independently about how Microsoft’s use of AI might create unintended negative consequences in the world. While the company continues to tout its investment in responsible AI** (as does every firm looking to make a profit in the field), Casey’s reporting raises serious questions, particularly given the Valley’s history of ignoring inconvenient truths.

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Ads in Chat-Based Search? Of Course – But What Kind?

Artwork Cheri Stamen for Signal360

I’ve written a long-ish post attempting to answer that question over at P&G’s Signal360 publication, please head there (and sign up for their newsletter!) if you’d like to read the whole thing. Below is a teaser for those of you who aren’t sure you want to click the link (so few of us do these days!). 

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Toothpaste, Tubes And Semantics: Is AI Chat Search? Who Cares?!

 

“Lots of toothpaste coming out of a toothpaste tube with the Google logo on it, digital art”

Last week, while working on a post about what the ads might look like inside chat-based search, I got a surprising note from the communications team at Google. I had emailed them asking for comment on ads inside Bard, which Google had announced earlier in the month. To be honest, I was expecting the polite “no comment” I ultimately did receive, but I also got this clarification:

[We] wouldn’t have anything additional to share from the Search POV, as Bard is a standalone AI interface and doesn’t sit within Search.

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What If Google Goes on Offense?

Last week I asked if Google was f*cked, and since then quite a few of you have reached out asking what I think the company could do to … un-f*ck itself. “Easy enough to declare the company is too big, too stuck in the mud, too cautious, too dependent on its cash cow,” you told me. “Much harder to advise them on what to do about it.” One of you just sighed to me on the phone, then said “it’s always been this way. No large company can escape the innovator’s dilemma.”

Well, maybe so, but wouldn’t it be fun to try? I’ve been in touch with various Googlers over the past few weeks, as I’m still working on a “What should the ads look like” piece around ChatGPT and AI-driven search (promise, it’ll be done soon). While folks at Google are polite and engaged, they’ve also given me the extended play version of “No comment” – stating it’s too early to declare the business model for conversational search. In short,  they’re waiting for the market to reveal itself a bit more before making any public statements or declaring themselves all in on tech’s next big trend.

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OpenAI: Platform or Destination?

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (left), and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Image Microsoft

Do generative AI innovations like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s LaMDA represent a new and foundational technology platform like Microsoft Windows, Apple iOS or the Internet? Or are they just fun and/or useful new products that millions will eventually use, like Google Docs or Instagram? I think the answer can and should be “both” – but to get there, the Valley is going to have to forego the walled garden destination model it’s employed these past 15 or so years.

The question of OpenAI’s ultimate business model has dominated nearly every conversation I’ve had this week, whether it’s with reporters from the Economist and the Journal, senior executives at large-scale public companies, or CEOs of ad-tech and data startups. Everyone wants to know: What’s the impact of generative AI on the technology industry? Will OpenAI be the next Google or Apple? Who wins, and who will lose?

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Neeva Combines AI and Search – Now Comes The Hard Part

The Very Hardest Thing

What’s the hardest thing you could do as a tech-driven startup? I’ve been asked that question a few times over the years, and my immediate answer is always the same:  Trying to beat Google in search. A few have tried – DuckDuckGo has built itself a sizable niche business, and there’s always Bing, thought it’s stuck at less than ten percent of Google’s market (and Microsoft isn’t exactly a startup.) But it’s damn hard to find venture money for a company whose mission is to disrupt the multi-hundred billion dollar search market – and for good reason. Google is just too damn well positioned, and if Microsoft can’t unseat them, how the hell could a small team of upstarts?

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Bing, Google, and Conversational Search – Is OpenAI an Arms Merchant, Or a Microsoft Ally?

The Mac represented a new interface paradigm for computing, one that Microsoft ignored – until it couldn’t. Will Google do the same?

Just last week I predicted that Google would leverage ChatGPT to create a conversational interface to its search business, and that Microsoft would do the same in the enterprise data market. I briefly considered that I might have gotten it exactly backwards – Google has a robust enterprise data business in its cloud business (known as GCP), and of course Microsoft has Bing. But I quickly dismissed that notion – figuring that each behemoth would play the GPT card toward their strengths.

While I may have been right about ChatGPT getting a business model this year, it looks like I could be wrong on the details. Here’s The Information with a scoop:

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Predictions ’23 – The Summary

I’ve used the image above for many years, mainly because I love how surprised the guy looks as he gazes into the crystal ball. Or maybe he’s just sat on something unpleasant. In any case, it pretty much sums up my approach to this, my 20th edition of annual predictions. I sit down, I might have an adult beverage on hand, and I just write until I feel like I’m done.

While reviewing my ’22 predictions (I did pretty well!) I promised to do something new: One post per predictions, ten posts total. But as I began that promised work, I realized it would test the limits of even my most dedicated readers (I see you, kids). So instead I wrote three long form posts, each with three or four predictions apiece. The first focused on AI, the second on advertising, and the third on markets, with a bonus call related to the ’24 election. Having now written all of them, I’m going to summarize them briefly in this “master post.” Grab your own favorite beverage, have a wonderful New Year, and read on!

  1. ChatGPT finds a business model. Because of course it will. Which leads to…
  2. Google launches a ChatGPT-inspired search interface. Because paranoia. Related…
  3. Microsoft launches “Enterprise Explorer” – because there isn’t a big company CEO who doesn’t want some AI to play with.
  4. There’ll be a war between the duopolies of Google/Facebook and Amazon/Apple. Grab your popcorn.
  5. Netflix will triumph. I know…but the next one’s even more far fetched…
  6. Twitter will rebound. (I’ll leave it there for now)
  7. Crypto will go sideways in ’23. But that’ll be a good thing.
  8. Tesla will continue to tank, and not because of Twitter.
  9. Tech IPOs will make a comeback by EOY.
  10. Trump will pull out of the ’24 presidential race.
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Predictions ’23: AI Gets a Business Model (or Three)

Let’s start our 2023 predictions off with some thoughts on artificial intelligence. With ChatGPT, Silicon Valley seems to have gotten a bit of its mojo back. After two decades spent simmering the magic of Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook into a sticky lucre of corporate profit, here was the kind of technological marvel the industry seemed to have forgotten how to make – a magical tour de force that surprised, mystified, and delighted millions.

Even better, ChatGPT didn’t come from any of those corporate titans – not directly, anyway. Instead it came from a non-profit artificial intelligence research laboratory called OpenAI.  Founded in 2015 with a mission of furthering “responsible AI,” OpenAI is backed by some of the most celebrated names in Valley technology – LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, PayPal’s Peter Theil, Tesla’s Elon Musk among them. Now this was more like it!

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