In the biggest blow yet to Google's decades-old search dominance, it is reported that Samsung Alphabet is considering a move to adopt Microsoft's Bing search engine. The plan, if it materializes, will mark the beginning of the end of Alphabet-owned Google's undisputed dominance in the Internet search segment.
A New York Times report said on Sunday that Samsung, the world's leading smartphone maker, could ditch Google search engine and run Bing on its smartphones. It is not yet confirmed if this would happen and negotiations are going on, the report said.
Samsung Made 261 Million Smartphones in 2022
South Korea-based Samsung produced a whopping 261 million smartphones in 2022. Samsung's switch to Bing could upfront cost Google more than $3 billion in revenue. More importantly, Samsung's adoption of Bing will break the monopoly of Google and galvanize competition in the segment.
The launch of ChatGPT at the end of the last year was predicted to shake up the search business. Google responded instantly to the success of Microsoft-supported ChatGPT by committing large funds to accelerate its own product development in the Large Language Model segment.
Google unveiled its new artificial intelligence (AI) service 'Bard' to compete against OpenAI's ChatGPT in February. Bard is an "experimental conversational AI service" which is powered by Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), Google CEO Sundar Pichai said.
After news broke that Samsung is mulling a switch to Bing, shares of Google parent Alphabet plunged 4.5 percent in premarket trading in New York. Meanwhile, Microsoft shares edged up by nearly 2 percent.
Biggest Ever Threat
There have been many regulatory moves that trained guns on Google's near total dominance in Internet search in the last 15 years. Governments around the world have been watching the competition-stifling practices by the search giant, and there were even calls by US Senators to break up Google to end its monopoly. However, the biggest threat to Google appears to be the emergence of generative AI.
"Google may be only a year or two away from total disruption. AI will eliminate the Search Engine Result Page, which is where they make most of their money ... Even if they catch up on AI, they can't fully deploy it without destroying the most valuable part of their business!", Paul Buchheit, one of the creators of Gmail,said last year.
Internet Giants Double Down on AI
Amazon said on Thursday the company will invest heavily in artificial intelligence in the aftermath of the huge success of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Amazon will focus on large language models and generative AI, which are the technologies that power ChatGPT and other AI chatbots unveiled by Google, Baidu and others.
In January, Microsoft announced plans to make a huge investment in the artificial intelligence field following the success of ChatGPT launch. In March, Facebook parent Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company's single largest investment is in advancing AI and building it into every one of its products. In February, Chinese Internet giant Baidu unveiled its artificial intelligence chatbot, which is named 'Wenxin Yiyan' in Chinese or 'ERNIE' in English.
