Google's Race to Dethrone OpenAI

Here’s a quick summary of Google earlier this year:

Ok, now that we’re all caught up, let’s dive in.

It’s kind of fun watching massive companies stumble a bit—especially when it’s caused by a newcomer like OpenAI.

But Google is Google for a reason. And now we’re seeing why that is.

Over the past few months, Google’s picked up the pieces of their AI strategy and made meaningful progress against OpenAI.

Here are three signals that show us they’re not going down without a fight:

1. Gemini

Google Gemini is a yet-to-be-released multimodal intelligence network—meaning it can handle multiple types of data simultaneously.

That means that, unlike ChatGPT, Gemini will be able to process images, audio, 3D models, and even graphs in addition to text.

Another advantage for Gemini will be the amount of data it’s trained on, such as Google Search results, YouTube videos, and Google Books.

This will give it a massive advantage over other AI models, which are trained on smaller collections of information.

2. Duet AI

Google officially rolled out a digital assistant to help its Workspace app users. And no, they didn’t bring Clippy back from the dead.

Google Duet AI is like Clippy on steroids. It can turn Google Doc outlines into a deck in Slides, write responses in Gmail, summarize your documents, and much more.

It’s a good reminder of the distribution advantage that Google has over OpenAI. Sure, the latter can establish partnerships with Microsoft and other software vendors, but Google already has a widely used set of apps that it can plug its AI technology into.

And it goes beyond their Workspace apps. At their recent Google Cloud Next event, they announced Duet AI will be coming to their Data Analytics, Database, Cloud, Security Cloud, and Business Intelligence tools, as well.

3. Declining ChatGPT Traffic

Sparktoro and Datos shared a great study highlighting the details of this.

But TLDR: ChatGPT traffic is declining across both new and returning users.

To be fair, it’s still way higher than Bard’s traffic. But at the very least, Google can rest a bit knowing that the ChatGPT hype is tapering off a bit.

And in terms of search volume, Bard is about equal with Bing now (whose partnership with OpenAI was a thorn in their side earlier this year):

But listen, this isn’t one of those “ChatGPT is dead” blogs.

It’s just a reminder that things can change quickly and to never count anyone out—especially a company like Google.

We saw this with X and Threads a couple months ago too.

It seemed like Zuck had gotten the best of Elon and X as Threads shot past 100M users in just 5 days. But now here we are with Threads users shrinking back to Earth and X doing fine still breathing.

💚Andy

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