All that for this ! At the start of the year, Microsoft had squashed the mushroom to integrate as quickly as possible a bot based on the capabilities developed by OpenAI for ChatGPT. The publisher thought it had the ultimate weapon to trip up Google… but ultimately no.
Generative artificial intelligence was not enough for Bing, which still remains very far from the leader in internet search, Google. Actually, Bing even lost market shares between October 2022 and last month in the United States (from 7.4% to 6.92%) and worldwide (from 3.59% to 3.13%), according to StatCounter statistics.
Bing, so far so close
These results, which reflect those already recorded this summer, confirm the dominant position of Google which flirts with 90%. During the various trials which are currently occupying the search engine’s lawyers, we learned that the company was ready to put billions into line to impose its presence on iPhones and Android smartphones – to the detriment of competition? This is what these trials seek to establish.
Read Google showers Samsung with a rain of dollars to maintain its place in Galaxy smartphones and Apple receives a large percentage of Google’s revenues with Safari
GPT-4 was therefore not Bing’s Trojan horse to take Google’s place among Internet users. However, Microsoft is paying dearly for the Bing bot: the Windows publisher has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI capital, while requests to GPT-4 are expensive in terms of online processing.
Fortunately for Microsoft, it’s not just Bing. The company infuses generative AI into all its services and software, Office and Windows which integrate their own Copilot (soon in Europe, unless you tinker). But for Bing to truly take the lead against Google, it’s going to take more than a bot.
During the trial initiated by the American government against the search engine, Satya Nadella, the boss of Microsoft, deplored the agreement between Google and Apple which allows the first to be the default search engine in the web browser of the second . For the manager, what would really allow Bing to take off is to take Google’s place in Safari!
But given the crazy sums paid by Google to Apple, that’s not likely to happen any time soon – even if Microsoft is ready to take out the checkbook or even outright sell Bing to Apple…
Read Microsoft wanted to sell Bing to Apple
