May 2024
Teaching Note
HBS Case Collection

AI Wars

By: Andy Wu and Matt Higgins

Format:Print
| Language:English
| Pages:34

Abstract

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 723-434. In 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 popularized over a year ago by OpenAI and their chatbot ChatGPT and GPT-3 and -GPT-4 models. 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. 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?