Of all of the big tech companies challenged by the rise of AI, Google is arguably the most vulnerable. In a future where AI tools are ubiquitous, Apple will probably still be making phones and computers, Meta will still be connecting us to our friends, and Amazon will still be selling and shipping us products.
But Google? The company’s major cash cow is advertising, which last year was responsible for 77% of the firm’s $307 billion revenue. And this could easily disappear if suddenly we have AI assistants scouring the web and answering questions for us.
Unsurprisingly, then, Google is racing to catch up with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and the creators of the best-known AI model currently available, GPT-4. It recently launched its latest weapon in the AI war, replacing the Bard model it rushed out after ChatGPT first launched with a new large language model (LLM) named Gemini.
On the surface, it works much like ChatGPT or Bard: