The tech giant would like to accelerate adding artificial intelligence to stay ahead of the competition. But, for example, Google would fear losing lucrative deals with Samsung to Bing.
The introduction of generative AI seems to be shaking the cards in the lucrative search bot market for the first time in a long time. Google, the dominant search engine for years, is working on a project to integrate additional AI into its services quickly. The project, codenamed Magi, should ensure that Google Search offers a more personalized experience and can, for example, answer questions and write code at the request of users. That reports the New York Times. Google would also like to build an entirely new search engine powered by AI.
According to the newspaper, Magi must get results quickly, which reports that Google has assigned 160 full-time developers and designers to the project. The reason for that speed is the competition Google seems to be feeling. Competitor Microsoft closed a deal with AI developers OpenAI at the end of last year to process their chatbot ChatGPT in the Bing search engine. That seems to be a success, despite problems with AI.
Such a success that companies such as Samsung and Apple are planning to use Bing as the default search engine in their mobile operating systems. The market for mobile search is highly lucrative for Google, so a change here could have painful consequences for the company.
For example, according to the newspaper, Samsung, one of the world’s largest smartphone manufacturers, would generate 3 billion in revenue for Google per year through advertisements on its search engine. Apple also has an agreement with Google regarding the default search engine, and that contract (worth another 20 billion euros, according to the newspaper) should be renewed this year. The news that Samsung is considering replacing Google with Bing already caused Alphabet shares to fall on the stock market this week and a slight increase for Microsoft.
The latter has invested billions in OpenAI and is rapidly building ChatGPT’s intelligence into various services and apps. For example, AI-powered search features are now available in the Bing search engine and the Edge browser on computers and mobile devices. That created a lot of interest in Bing, Microsoft’s search engine that has been trying to take a share of the market for years. However, that extra interest has not yet been fully cashed in. According to analyst Statcounter, Bing had a market share of less than 3% in March of this year (so after the introduction of AI). Google is at 93%.
