Bing When You're Winning
"Today was a day where we brought some more competition to search. Believe me, I’ve been at it for 20 years, and I’ve been waiting for it. But look, at the end of the day, they’re the 800-pound gorilla in this. That is what they are. And I hope that, with our innovation, they will definitely want to come out and show that they can dance. And I want people to know that we made them dance, and I think that’ll be a great day."
That was one of a few provocative statements that Satya Nadella made about Google in February of 2023, when Microsoft launched their AI-powered version of Bing. Part of it was clearly marketing – "reinventing search" – a way to get the press to write about a search engine that continued to be an also-ran despite billions upon billions of dollars having been spent over all those years to compete with the search giant. But part of it sure felt like hubris as well. Quotes such as this one read like Nadella thought he finally had a winning hand. A way to make Google dance, as it were.
And Nadella probably had good reason to think that this time might be different. After all, this new version of Bing wasn't just AI-powered, it was powered by OpenAI. You know, the creators of ChatGPT, the AI app which was in the middle of taking the world by storm. And Microsoft – thanks to their extremely prescient bet on the startup a few years prior – seemingly had exclusive access to a new model that OpenAI was on the verge of releasing. A model which those in the know were buzzing about to no end: GPT-4.
Hell, it got me to not only give Bing another go, but to even download their mobile app! And I wasn't alone – before long we had Bing's bot trying to convince New York Times reporters to leave their spouses. While this perhaps wasn't the exact AI vanguard where anyone wanted to be, it was the vanguard nonetheless. And Microsoft was right there at the forefront! Of AI! Google, it seems, did start to shuffle their feet a bit...
But just a few weeks later, as OpenAI officially rolled out GPT-4 themselves, Microsoft's music already started to quiet. A few months after that, it looked as if Google was indeed now dancing – but it wasn't Bing that was making them move. It was ChatGPT.