It’s probably not going well in Google’s headquarters while waiting for May 9th. Yes, because on that day, according to increasingly insistent rumours, the new search engine from OpenAI, the company led by Sam Altman who developed the famous ChatGpt, will be revealed. If this were the case, for Alphabet (the parent company of Google) a competitor would appear on the horizon potentially capable of calling into question its thirty-year excessive power in a field where it occupies a 90 percent market share. In truth, it has been talked about for a long time in the tech world. The rumor has gained new vigor after a user on Reddit reported the existence of the domain “https://search.chatgpt.com”, but at the moment typing it comes across the word “not found”.
To distinguish whether it is truth or legend, in any case, it will be enough to wait a few days. What is certain is that Altman has long announced his desire to make the so-called text generators based on artificial intelligence (see ChatGpt) and web search work together, a fusion that should give rise to a much more powerful and capable product. to give more precise and detailed answers to Internet surfers. Expectations are high, also because it is written as OpenAI, but reads as Microsoft. The big company led by Satya Nadella has invested over 13 billion dollars in Altman’s company and is reaping the benefits. So much so that the latest quarterly accounts show a 20% increase in profits thanks to artificial intelligence and Microsoft itself has started to enhance its Bing search engine with AI.
Equally true is that the group led by CEO Sundar Pichai is not standing still: it has invested a lot to develop Gemini (its ChatGpt) and is said to be ready to present its counter-move shortly, when at the developers conference on May 14th progress on the AI front and a response to OpenAI will likely be announced. But if the ChatGpt-Microsoft combination is currently the most dangerous for Google, even the laggards in artificial intelligence are pushing to recover lost ground.
Apple boss Tim Cook is seeing creaks in his empire: sluggish iPhone sales (-10% compared to the first quarter of 2023) and the absence of innovations could mark its decline. It is no coincidence that an old investment wolf, Warren Buffett, with his Berkshire Hathaway (which in the first three months had a monstrous operating profit of 11.2 billion) updated the value of his stake in Apple in the last quarter: – 22% to 135.4 billion compared to -11% recorded on Wall Street. In this context we read Cook’s idea of announcing a maxi buyback of 110 billion dollars to support the title, the largest share buyback in Cupertino’s history. Work is also being done on the AI front, in recent years Apple has invested in stealing specialists from Google, from which it would have taken away 36 of the best from 2018 to today. According to the Financial Times, he has created a secret laboratory in Europe, in Zurich, with the aim of developing new products that exploit artificial intelligence.
Meta (the home of Facebook and Instagram) is also preparing to focus heavily on AI, so far halfway through its Metaverse project. In fact, during the presentation of the latest accounts, CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicated a cost target of up to 10 billion higher for the development of AI in 2024.
An announcement that caused the stock to collapse (-15%), but which could pay off in the long term.
