The artificial-intelligence battle between Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google could be heating up again, this time playing out on mobile devices.
Shares of Alphabet
GOOG,
GOOGL,
were falling 3% in Monday morning activity after a New York Times report said that Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.
005930,
was considering ditching Google as the default search engine on its devices and giving Microsoft’s
MSFT,
Bing the nod instead. The report said that up to $3 billion in yearly revenue was at stake for Google through its deal with Samsung, though Samsung has yet to make a decision on the default search engine.
Google and Samsung didn’t immediately respond to MarketWatch’s request for comment on the New York Times report.
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While Bing largely has been an afterthought thus far in the world of search, the AI revolution brings the possibility that Bing could claw at some of Google’s market share. Microsoft is an investor in OpenAI, the maker of chatbot ChatGPT, and has been working to infuse Bing with some of the features that have made ChatGPT so popular.
Microsoft and Google both invested in AI development long before ChatGPT burst on the scene, but ChatGPT has helped show the general public the power of AI, and Microsoft worked quickly after that to incorporate OpenAI technology into its search product. Google followed with its introduction of BardAI, another chatbot.
See also: Google opens up access to Bard AI chatbot, its rival to ChatGPT
Shares of Microsoft were up 1.7% in premarket trading Monday.
The AI race has Google executives thinking of new approaches to search, according to the New York Times report, which said that executives were racing to develop a new search engine that’s powered by AI.
Google has long been dominant in search, but the mobile wars could stretch beyond Samsung devices. The New York Times said that Google’s search deal with Apple Inc.
AAPL,
is up for renewal this year. That deal has $20 billion in revenue implications, according to the report.
A Microsoft executive said earlier this year that for each point of share gains that the company might rack up in search advertising, Microsoft’s advertising business could see a $2 billion revenue boost. Still, analysts have cautioned that winning meaningful search share likely won’t be easy for Microsoft, even with the benefits of OpenAI.
This post was originally published on Market Watch
