Microsoft Singles Out Google's Competitive Edge in Generative AI

Google enjoys a competitive edge in generative AI due to its trove of data and AI-optimised chips, Microsoft has told EU antitrust regulators, underscoring the rivalry between the two tech giants. From a report: The comments by Microsoft were in response to a consultation launched by the European Commission in January on the level of competition in generative AI. The growing popularity of generative AI, which can generate human-like responses to written prompts and is exemplified by Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's chatbot Gemini, has triggered concerns about misinformation and fake news.

"Today, only one company - Google - is vertically integrated in a manner that provides it with strength and independence at every AI layer from chips to a thriving mobile app store. Everyone else must rely on partnerships to innovate and compete," Microsoft said in its report to the Commission. It said Google's self-supply AI semiconductors would give it a competitive advantage for the years to come, while its large sets of proprietary data from Google Search Index and YouTube enabled it to train its large language model Gemini. "YouTube provides an unparalleled set of video content; it hosts an estimated 14 billion videos. Google has access to such content; but other AI developers do not," Microsoft said.

legality of user content

[schneidafunk]

So google is allowed to train data from user content but others are not? Doesn't microsoft use github data for training purposes as well? Seems a bit hypocritical to say the least.

Re:

[Jason Earl]

The license that Youtube has content providers agree to is incredibly broad. Youtube can basically use that content however it would like, including sublicensing it, monetizing it, and retaining it after you have deleted it from the service. People uploading stuff to Youtube give Youtube an incredible amount of rights over their work.

Github's license, on the other hand, does not grant them extensive rights. Heck, they treat most repos as private. Worse, many of the Free Software licenses that they pro

Tung

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Come on, Microsoft. For 20 years you have been the king of non-innovators, wating to see what works, then hemorrhaging cash and market position to conjure into existence competition. Usually chronically and unrecoverably lagging at that point.

Few companies have the cash one could say, well, go build your own custom chips, giant databases, and vertical integration. You're one of the few! You'll still lag unless your ai becomes outstanding, but them's the breaks.

Google's been using captchas to gather info on scene analysis for almost that long. Y tu?

Google doesn't fab chips

[CycleMan]

Silly Microsoft! Google doesn't fabricate its own chips. Broadcom does the physical design and TSMC builds them. It's public knowledge. https://www.theinformation.com... [theinformation.com]

Oh NO

[OfMiceAndMenus]

Better Headline: "World's Most Popular Operating System Creator Who Has Been Tracking Browsing History And Computer Use For A Decade Angry At World's Most Popular Search Engine Creator For Doing The Same Thing".

We just need a global GDPR at this point.

Re:

[Kiliani]

Classic "I was bad, but the other one was badder!" defense. Had a good laugh ...

Re:

[backslashdot]

Uh, no thanks ... that's totally the wrong solution. GDPR fucked itself off because of the stupid cookie notice law. Anyone who came up with that should be locked up in a mental institution.
1. Every website has the annoying pop-up notice ..even ones that don't need it, because the law is scary.
2. Everyone clicks "Accept All Cookies"
3. Most websites display GDPR notices that are managed and tracked by a few stupid companies like Onetrust -- and that's dumb in itself.

Re:

[OfMiceAndMenus]

Nah, GDPR works, and the cookie notice is the stupidest point to be mad about. There's even extensions you can use to kill them if they bother you.

1. Every website has the annoying pop-up notice ..even ones that don't need it, because the law is scary.

Some don't. The ones that don't really operate in the EU. And most of them that do show this bar have a single button to click for "Necessary Only" or "Reject All".

2. Everyone clicks "Accept All Cookies"

Again, not usually. I never click that. I've taught my entire family not to click it. We train clients not to click it. And even if you do click it, you just go back to the pre-GDPR state of the site

ChatGPT is 2 years behind the times

[C0L0PH0N]

I can ask Gemini a question, and the answers are of the current time. Whenever I ask ChatGPT, is warns that it's data is only current up until 2 years ago. That renders ChatGPT pretty irrelevant to anything going on in the current world. For example, I just asked ChatGPT a question, and it warned its last update was January, 2022! Really!

Re:

[cstacy]

I can ask Gemini a question, and the answers are of the current time.

Whatever that means, so it claims.

Re: ChatGPT is 2 years behind the times

[LindleyF]

It's becoming clear that language knowledge is not the same as domain knowledge. No matter how recently an LLM was trained, its language model is not the right source for factual information. It should query that from elsewhere and then use the language model to summarize the results.

Re:

[Tony Isaac]

Your knowledge is behind the times. ChatGPT can access current data as well. https://www.bbc.com/news/techn... [bbc.com]

Search Engine advantage

[cstacy]

So, Microsoft is saying that their own Bing search engine is not anywhere near as good as Google, and the latter being more popular (even though almost every computer in the world comes pre-installed with the Microsoft engine) constitutes an unfair competitive advantage that must be sanctioned or eliminated by the Government.

"My product sucks. Please bring out guns and prisons to take down the competition for me!"

waaaahhh

[CEC-P]

Slow, out of touch dinosaur of a company whines that other slow and out of touch company is winning at AI. Boo hoo. Well, don't worry, Google's is racist AF because it's made by deranged racists so the appearance of winning is merely temporary. MS has plenty of time to make their crappy AI more subtly racist.

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

Google's is racist AF

Pretty much indisputable at this point. Google is an anti-white racist company.

it's made by deranged racists

This blow up with Gemini is going to be hard to live down. As a white guy, I certainly am not anxious to try it.

MS has plenty of time to make their crappy AI more subtly racist.

Yes, they will need to conceal the anti-white racism a bit better, but I have little doubt that it's going to be racist. Any AI image-bot that created black and brown folks in the images with the same frequency the occur in the population would be pilloried for being a wh1te supr3amacist.

What's wrong about doing something right?

[allo]

Google advanced AI quite a lot. What's bad about doing do? They both saw a trend and they helped progress. Now they are in a good position. What's the problem with that?

And I don't understand Microsoft either. While Google has good hardware and good models for, e.g., image recognition, it's generative AI are failures. Gemini sucks while MS does have a good partnership with OpenAI who create GenAI that actually work. Yeah, ChatGPT is getting worse (probably because they are optimizing costs), but Gemini isn'