Google and Microsoft, two of the biggest players in the artificial intelligence (AI) space and tech sector rivals, provided updates on their respective AI programs on Tuesday when the companies announced their first-quarter earnings.
Both companies have invested heavily in AI-related research and its applications for the web search, where the two firms are engaged in a particularly tense competition following Microsoft’s addition of AI to its Bing search engine, in addition to cloud storage and more.
Here’s a look at some of the AI-related highlights from the Google and Microsoft first-quarter earnings calls.
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Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, said that in the first quarter the company "introduced important product updates anchored in deep computer science and AI."
Those improvements are focused on three areas: "Continuing to build up state-of-the-art large language models and make significant improvements across our products to be more helpful to our users. Empowering developers, creators and partners with our tools. And enabling organizations of all sizes to utilize and benefit from our AI advances."
Pichai noted the release of an updated version of the Google Bard AI chatbot earlier this month after it first debuted in March to include coding capabilities that had been requested by users. The company is doing that by incorporating its Pathways Language Model (PaLM) into Bard, as the PaLM is a large language model (LLM) that was trained on a larger dataset that the prior LLM, known as LaMDA.
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"We have since added our PaLM model to make it even more powerful, and Bard can now help people with programming and software development tasks, including code generation. Lots more to come," Pichai said.
He added that PaLM is being incorporated into the new MakerSuite for developers and noted, "It provides a simple way to access our large language models and begin building new generative AI applications quickly. A number of organizations are using our generative AI large language models across Google Cloud platform, Google Workspace and our cybersecurity offerings."
On potential AI-related improvements to Google’s search engine, Pichai didn’t go into detail but said, "We will continue to incorporate generative AI advances to make search better in a thoughtful and deliberate way."
Google is reportedly planning to release new AI tools for search as a means of countering the incorporation of ChatGPT into Microsoft’s Bing search engine. The New York Times reported that the AI search features are being developed by Google under the codename "Magi" and could have an initial rollout next month with additional features in the fall.
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"The world’s most advanced AI models are coming together with the world’s most universal user interface – natural language – to create a new era of computing," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. "Across the Microsoft Cloud, we are the platform of choice to help customers get the most value out of their digital spend and innovate for this next generation of AI."
Nadella said Microsoft has more than 2,500 customers using its Azure OpenAI service, which became generally available in January and had GPT-4 incorporated in March.
"We have the most powerful AI infrastructure, and it’s being used by our partner, OpenAI, as well as NVIDIA and leading AI startups like Adept and Inflection to train large models. Our Azure OpenAI Service brings together advanced models, including ChatGPT and GPT-4, with the enterprise capabilities of Azure."
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Nadella called Microsoft 365 Copilot the "future of work" in his opening remarks. Copilot was released last month and appears in Microsoft Office programs like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook as an AI chatbot that can help draft content and presentations, summarize email threads and automate repetitive tasks.
"Microsoft 365 Copilot combines next generation AI with business data in the Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 applications, removing the drudgery and unleashing the creativity of work," Nadella said. "Copilot works alongside users, embedded in the Microsoft 365 applications millions use every day, and it also powers Business Chat, which uses natural language to surface information and insights based on business content and context."
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Microsoft’s Bing has 100 million daily users and Nadella said that downloads of the search engine have jumped since AI features were incorporated into the tool. Specifically, Nadella said that "daily installs of the Bing mobile app have grown [four times] since launch."
"We continue to innovate with first-of-their-kind AI-powered features, including the ability to set the tone of chat and create images from text prompts, powered by Dall-E. Over 200 million images have been created to date," Nadella said.
Nadella also said Microsoft will "share how we are building the most powerful AI platform for developers" at the company’s Build conference, which is scheduled for May 23-25, 2023.
