I love the competition in the AI that’s pushing our world forward. OpenAI with its partner Microsoft have unleashed the beast and now Google has started to show off what they have been working on with a much larger team for a longer period of time.
It seems like a waiting game. What I get from it is that Google’s AI department developed a very powerful general model, but was hesitant to release it due to its potentially negative impact on the main stream of Google’s revenue, which is search advertising.
Early in 2023, I was genuinely excited about Microsoft’s introduction of AI into its products. From Microsoft SwiftKey, a mobile keyboard app that helps you to refine your text, to Designer, which generates content for social media. So far, this has peaked with Copilot being added to Windows 11 for free.
However, Google’s agility and friendliness toward small businesses and solo entrepreneurs outpaced Microsoft in many ways. Google Pixel phones now come with helpful AI features built-in, empowering us throughout the day with summaries, suggestions and amazing image editing capabilities. Just take a look at this week’s December Feature Drop.
Microsoft is much faster and more iterative than ever before, but it didn’t completely get rid of its corporate-first approach, neglecting small businesses. Microsoft 365 Copilot, which should be the flagship tool driving our productivity, is priced similarly to Google Duet AI. However, if your organization has fewer than 300 users, you are out of luck 😯.
So far, I’m happy with my decision to move from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace. Despite the latest OpenAI ChatGPT4 hype, Google gives me much better responses with its Bard and Duet AI, making me at least 2x more productive. Whether it’s reviewing my python code, providing richer and faster responses to Google Search and drafting/refining my texts, to empowering me with my data science learnings by offering thorough explanations with visual demonstrations.
And then, just yesterday, Google introduced Gemini. It is promised to be even more powerful than the current model, helping us with more specialized tasks, lines of code and more. The ongoing integration of Gemini into Google’s services and products fills me with excitement about what we will be able to accomplish in a single day and how rapidly we can grow. What an individual and we, as a society can achieve in one generation will at least double.
Thank you, fearless researchers and entrepreneurs.
So, Microsoft and Sam, how are you going to beat this?
