AI Wars

In February 2024, the world was looking to Google to see what the search giant and long-time putative technical leader in artificial intelligence (AI) would do to compete in the massively hyped technology of generative AI. Over a year ago, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a text-generating chatbot that captured widespread attention. OpenAI would offer a range of new generative AI products as both user-facing applications and developer-facing application programing interfaces (APIs). In January 2023, Microsoft and OpenAI signed a $10 billion deal extending their exclusive partnership. Microsoft would continue to supply OpenAI with seemingly unlimited computing power from its Azure cloud, and Microsoft hoped that OpenAI’s technology and brand would keep Microsoft at the center of the new generative AI boom. Microsoft announced that it would soon begin deploying OpenAI’s technologies throughout its suite of products, from its Microsoft 365 productivity apps to its search engine Bing. Google needed to decide how to respond to the threat posed by OpenAI and Microsoft.

Google had a decade of experience developing and deploying AI and machine learning (ML) technologies in its products, but much of their AI work happened in-house and behind the scenes. Google researchers had invented the transformer architecture that made the generative breakthroughs demonstrated by GPT possible. Breakthroughs in AI had been quietly supercharging Google products like Search and Ads for years, but most of the product work was internal and little of it had penetrated the public consciousness. Until 2022, Google leadership had been deliberately cautious about revealing the extent of their AI progress and opening Google’s experimental AI tools to the public. Was generative AI really ready for user-facing applications? Was the public, not to mention the Google PR department, ready for the changes and controversies that more visible and active AI might unleash? What did Google have to gain, or lose, in this opening salvo of the AI wars? Most pressingly, how should Google respond to moves from Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and many others to commercialize generative AI in what was becoming the biggest big tech narrative of 2024?