Google turns 25 this month. It finds itself in a technology landscape that has changed dramatically since the early days when it was launched by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998.
Back then, Google was just a search engine. He spent the first few months in the garage of Susan Wojcicki, the future boss of YouTube. I don’t need to tell you how well that search engine worked. It’s been 17 years since the word Google officially entered the dictionary.
Now part of a larger parent company called Alphabet, it’s been in just about every area of technology ever since. It dominates some of it to the point of jeopardizing competition, which sometimes worries regulators who try to block competition. What it is trying to do now is to become a leader in the AI race. But some say it’s already falling behind.
Google’s importance in the AI universe
The question now is whether Google can maintain its omnipresence in the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence.
Some insider complaints and rumors suggest that Google is falling behind. A leaked memo from a Google engineer has surfaced online saying that the firm has no AI “secret sauce” and is not in a favorable position to win the race. This has been exacerbated by the bot war.
For many people, the first time they consciously interacted with and were influenced by AI was with ChatGPT, the viral AI chat bot that exploded into the world in November 2022.
ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI, has received billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft, which it is currently integrating into its own products, including the Bing search engine and Office 365. ChatGPT is known as the “Google killer” for its ability to answer one question at a time.
ChatGPT uses “transformer”, a language processing architecture originally invented by Google. But when Google followed up a few months later with its own competitor Bard, it never had the same effect.
Will Bard succeed?
Bard has had a very careful launch. The tech giant said it was not suitable for those under 18. It was described by a senior executive as “an experiment”. Perhaps part of its caution was the result of a strange situation that preceded Bard.
Google’s not-so-secret AI weapon is hidden in its likely successful cloud business. It offers access to large networks of computers and processing power that the vast majority of cloud companies find logistically difficult to own or host on their own.
“Alphabet is poised to be at the center of the AI revolution with its Google Cloud business. Because there’s huge demand from businesses large and small to update infrastructure and have storage ready to run large productive AI workloads,” said Dr. D’Argo.
