The tech giant Google and I almost share the same birthday… give or take a few years.
Google turns 25 this month (I’ll have a few more candles on my cake) – and finds itself in a tech landscape that has changed dramatically since founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started it in 1998.
Back then Google was only a search engine, and it lived for its first few months in the garage of Susan Wojcicki – the future boss of YouTube.
You do not need me to tell you how well that search engine worked out. It has been 17 years since the word Google officially entered the dictionary. I remember a BBC discussion about whether we should use it as a verb on-air because of its potential to be a free advert for the firm.
That company – now part of a larger parent group called Alphabet – has since diversified into pretty much every area of tech and dominates some of them to an extent which sometimes troubles anti-competition regulators. Right now it is trying to Google itself into pole position in the AI race – but some say it has already fallen behind.
Hits and misses
Email and smartphones, software and hardware, driverless cars, digital assistants, YouTube – Google has spawned (and acquired) hundreds of products and services. Not all of them have worked out.
There are 288 retired projects listed on the Killed by Google website, include gaming platform Stadia and budget VR headset Google Cardboard.
The question now is whether Google can maintain its omnipresence in the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence.
There have been mutterings, including from within, that it has fallen behind. A leaked memo from a Google engineer found its way on to the net, in which he said the firm had no AI “secret sauce” and was not in a position to win the race.
This feeling was further fuelled by the battle of the bots.
What is AI, is it dangerous and what jobs are at risk?
‘Google killer’ ChatGPT sparks AI chatbot race
Google what our chatbot tells you… says Google
For many people, the first time they knowingly interacted with AI – and were impressed by it – came in the form of ChatGPT, the viral AI chatbot which exploded into the world in November 2022.
Its creator OpenAI has received billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft, which is now working it into its own products, including the Bing search engine and Office 365.
ChatGPT has been dubbed the “Google killer” because of the way it can answer a question in one go, rather than serve up pages and pages of search results.
It uses a language-processing architecture called a transformer which was actually invented by Google, but when Google followed up a few months later with its own rival Bard, it had nowhere near the same impact.
Bard was given a surprisingly cautious launch. It was not for under-18s, the tech giant said, and it was described to me as “an experiment” by a senior exec.
Perhaps part of its caution was in part a result of a weird situation which preceded Bard.