The Conversational AI Arms Race Has Begun

The grown-ups have entered the room.

On February 6, Google announced the imminent launch of Bard, its search experience fueled by conversational AI. Within 24 hours, Microsoft answered Google by releasing a new version of Bing Search also powered by conversational AI. 

It's an OpenAI Arms Race. OpenAI didn't start it. But OpenAI was the catalyst for these back-to-back announcements when the company made its ChatGPT chatbot available to the public in November 2022.

Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, noted on its blog that the new Bing “is running on a new, next-generation OpenAI large language model that is more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search. It takes key learnings and advancements from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5 – and it is even faster, more accurate and more capable.”

The new Bing had better live up to those words. I understand why Microsoft launched a version of the conversational Bing in preview mode. When you are a challenger brand, you have to be bold. But Bing has nowhere near the cachet and popularity as Google Search. 

And conversational AI is dogged with concerns about accuracy and bias. The critics will actively look for potential problems on Bing.

By contrast, Google has stressed it is taking more time to vet Bard with “trusted testers” -- a demographically and geographically diverse group of people external to Google who are supposed to help Google mitigate against bias creeping into the Bard search experience. An update: on February 8, Google's new conversational AI tool, Bard, provided inaccurate information in a high-profile public demo and promotion, causing a public embarrassment. The gaffe reinforced the wisdom of Google's original approach of developing AI-powered search tools on its own timetable and amplified the concerns about the accuracy of conversational AI tools.

Both Google and Microsoft have noted that with conversational AI, search becomes a jumping-off point for deeper, more creative experiences. According to Microsoft's blog,

There are times when you need more than an answer – you need inspiration. The new Bing can generate the content to help you. It can help you write an email, create a 5-day itinerary for a dream vacation to Hawaii, with links to book your travel and accommodations, prep for a job interview or create a quiz for trivia night. The new Bing also cites all its sources, so you’re able to see links to the web content it references.

And Sundar Pichai wrote that “Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills.”

In addition, Microsoft announced that it has updated the Edge browser with new AI capabilities and a new look, and the company has added two new functionalities: Chat and compose. Per Microsoft, with the Edge Sidebar, you can ask for a summary of a lengthy financial report to get the key takeaways – and then use the chat function to ask for a comparison to a competing company’s financials and automatically put it in a table. You can also ask Edge to help you compose content, such as a LinkedIn post, by giving it a few prompts to get you started. After that, you can ask it to help you update the tone, format and length of the post. Edge can understand the web page you’re on and adapts accordingly.

So far, at least one test of the functionality with Bing and Edge, from Engadget, has earned a thumbs-up. 

The integration is a good move on Microsoft’s part. Edge is hardly a popular browser, and here again, Microsoft is acting like a challenger brand by making a bolder move than Google did. 

Two lingering questions will be addressed soon.

• What will Bard and Bing do to Google's and Microsoft's advertising models? Conversational AI tools flourish by giving searchers detailed responses instead of links to other sites. But paid search on both Google and Bing depend on people staying engaged on Google Search and Microsoft Bing clicking on links. 

• Will problems with inaccurate responses and bias damage the search user experience? Having people vet Bard is no guarantee of success. Unless they’ve been chosen carefully and in an inclusive way, they could make problems of bias worse.

Meanwhile, it was time for Big Tech to put its muscle and thinking behind conversational AI. You can be sure that Amazon, the most popular source of product searches (even more popular than Google), will make an announcement of its own, and so will Apple.

Google especially needed to act. OpenAI was eating its lunch even though Google had been working on its own conversational AI tool for years. Once Bard goes live officially, the world will really change.