Microsoft’s “Prometheus”, Google’s “Bard” and You.Com — Three Places To Experience The AI Future Of The Internet
Are you ready for an epic paradigm shift?
Have you noticed that this week is going down in the history books?
You’ve probably heard it before: AI interfaces will lead to a paradigm shift.
Well, sooner than most of us thought, the time has come: Microsoft and Google are preparing for an epic tech battle and the AI future of the internet is about to lift-off!
What happened?
OpenAI’s conversational AI interface ChatGPT has reached an unprecedented adoption rate: 100 million users in 2 months!
The convenience and appropriateness of the chatGPT interface have spurred ideas for new AI applications and use cases and led to a rethinking of how we interact with machines in the future.
And this week, after months of rumors and likely intense backroom talks, the two tech giants finally threw down the gauntlet.
In a bold statement, Microsoft Chairman & CEO Satya Nadella announced the company’s plans to merge its “Bing” search engine and “Edge” browser into an AI-driven “copilot for the web”. He clarified that this is not another AI assistant relying on OpenAI’s publicly available models, but that Microsoft is aiming for an entirely new tool — something they are calling “Prometheus”: a combination of a publicly unavailable, probably specially trained, more powerful version of ChatGPT with the reliability of a search engine. Nadalla said:
“The race starts today […] and we’re going to move fast. I hope that with our innovation [Google] will definitely want to come out and show that they can dance and I want people to know that we made them dance.”
Bam! It’s on, I guess.
Well, and I suppose Google can dance indeed. In fact, just a few days before Nadella stepped up Google had disclosed their plans to release Bard, their own new conversational AI service. Just enjoy their press release, in which Google calls all the AI buzz its turf:
“[…] Google AI and DeepMind are advancing the state of the art. […] In fact, our Transformer research project and our field-defining paper in 2017, as well as our important advances in diffusion models, are now the basis of many of the generative AI applications you’re starting to see today.”
Bam!
And they’re right. Their Transformer research project was a true game changer and previously unthinkable applications and use cases are popping up daily now because of Google’s AI research! Check some of them here, here, and here.
What’s next:
Google will happily answer Microsoft’s call to dance, and it’s very likely to be a pretty interesting contest! With the two biggest tech companies committed to the user interface revolution, we will most likely witness a further acceleration in the redesign of machine interaction, especially network UI/UX.
What to watch:
- Microsoft’s Prometheus will be put to the test in the next months as part of www.bing.com. With its own AI model, Microsoft is aiming to combine the capabilities of ChatGPT with the reliability of a search engine to deliver more relevant, timely, and targeted results to users while improving security. The details of the model remain confidential, so far all we know is that it will allow users to answer search queries directly, cite sources and find up-to-date information. Try it out here:
- Google’s Bard will be available to the public in the coming weeks. Bard will be an “experimental conversational AI service” combining search engine capabilities with intelligence and creativity. It is said to provide fresh, high-quality responses to questions and can be used to explore both new and familiar topics. Stay tuned and find more about the details here:
- A few weeks ago I wrote about www.you.com in this article. At the time, it was one of the first projects aimed at an AI-powered search engine experience. At the time of writing, it has already matured into its “2.0” version and remains not only a great search tool, but also adds value by allowing users to integrate a whole range of AI tools into their “personal search page”. Aside from the big two, it’s definitely something to keep an eye on. Try it out here:
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