AI race in full swing as Google goes into overdrive to power Gemini
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Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) is rounding up the old guard as it looks to respond to recent developments that could threaten its market dominance and $150B per year Search business. The pressure centers around artificial intelligence and the need to put the technology at the center of its product strategy. The November release of ChatGPT by the Microsoft-backed (NASDAQ:MSFT) research company OpenAI was a big wake-up call, but since then there have been many other offerings, and the disruptive force has even seen Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META) pivot away from the metaverse.
The Gemini Project: Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have not spent much time at Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) since they left their daily roles in 2019, but they have upped their visits to headquarters in Mountain View, California, to ensure that AI is front and center in the company's plans. In fact, Brin is now in the office three to four days a week to develop the next large artificial intelligence system that hopes to challenge GPT-4. Reports suggest that he's even taken it upon himself to hire the most sought-after researchers in the field, building his own pool of intelligence as the competition intensifies.
To note, Brin is Alphabet's (GOOG) (GOOGL) second-largest individual shareholder after Page, with a stake valued at around $90B. They also control the majority of voting power at Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) and sit on an executive committee with current CEO Sundar Pichai, who declared a "code red" about emerging AI back in February. Since then, Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) has released its own chatbot called Bard that's powered by LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), put AI reinvention at the center of its I/O developer conference in May, and is even said to be testing an AI tool to write news stories and assist journalists.
SA commentary: "Google's opportunity for AI goes way beyond just integration into its Search business... AI-supported applications will likely be used in Google's Cloud platform as well as in its suite of productivity tools such as Google Docs," writes SA analyst The Asian Investor. "Investors are [also] missing the AI-driven opportunities of the powerful YouTube platform," noted Nexus Research. "Google also combined its two AI research groups, Brain and DeepMind, into one dubbed Google DeepMind," added Bradley Guichard, outlining two ways to generate yield from the growth stock.
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