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Wednesday, March 29, 2023
Microsoft's AI lead is far from guaranteed
When it comes to generative AI, Microsoft (MSFT) is dominating the conversation. After pouring billions into ChatGPT developer OpenAI, the tech giant is building out a small AI empire, adding the technology to everything from its Dynamics 365 to Office 365, and, of course, Bing. Now Microsoft is bringing generative AI to its cybersecurity offerings via its Microsoft Security Copilot.
It's all part of Microsoft’s strategy to ensure that when it comes to the latest generation of AI, it’s the company that you think of first. And it’s working.
“They are clearly out in front of everybody else,” Frank Dickson, group VP of security and trust at International Data Corporation, told Yahoo Finance.
But a head start doesn’t mean that Microsoft will stay in the lead forever. Google parent Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) is making big bets of its own, while Facebook parent Meta (META) is building a team of engineers to focus on the generative AI space.
“This is a baseball game,” Dickson said. “Microsoft is throwing the first pitch right now. The other team hasn't shown up for the game. And so we don't know when they're gonna show up for the game, and we don't know what they're going to bring to that game.”
The competition is coming
Microsoft’s big AI moves came at just the right time for the tech giant. It debuted its OpenAI-powered Bing search engine and Edge web browser in February as ChatGPT’s popularity exploded into the mainstream.
It kept riding that wave earlier this month when it announced that Bing hit a total of 100 million daily active users and that the software is running on OpenAI’s latest GPT-4 model.
By contrast, Google flubbed the debut of its competing generative AI chatbot Bard, with even employees calling the announcement “botched,” according to CNBC.
But Google has been packing different types of AI into nearly all of its products for years. And the fact that it debuted Bard a day before Bing and its AI assistant for Workspaces two days before Microsoft’s Office 365 Copilot, proves that it’s not willing to take Microsoft’s incursion into the AI space lying down.
Even more troublesome for Microsoft, though, is the fact that the attention it’s brought to generative AI is helping to spawn a host of other potential rivals.
“In driving so much excitement and attention around generative AI, you know, [Microsoft has] obviously driven a lot of new prospects and customers to themselves,” Forrester Analyst Rowan Curran told Yahoo Finance.