Battle for the search engine

Peter Garnry, Saxo’s Head of Equity Strategy, comments on Microsoft ’s massive investment in ChatGPT and the antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet .

AI as a technology has many different branches. The self-driving branch of AI has seen much lower investments over the past year as the technology has been slowing down remaining far from Level 5 autonomy driving. Other branches of AI like the large language models such as the newly released ChatGPT are seeing massive investments and Microsoft ’s $10bn investment underscores this.

Peter Garnry

The talk about ChatGPT and its potential threat to Alphabet ’s search engine business is real and has increased the investment risk for Alphabet ’s parent company Alphabet . However, Alphabet ’s AI unit DeepMind has already proclaimed that it will release this year its competing product to ChatGPT. The technology is in itself revolutionary, but it is patent protected and large language models (LLM) can be copied, which is what DeepMind is pursuing. The real challenge is the engineering part in order to scale fast queries and responses on top of the huge costs of training the LLM. The jury will be out for a long time whether Microsoft overpaid for this technology.

Antitrust lawsuits : business as usual

On Tuesday, the U.S. Justice Department filed its second antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet in just over two years. Alphabet ’s parent company Alphabet is still a strong business that has doubled its revenue and profits since 2018. Antitrust lawsuits are generally part of the operating environment for large US technology companies and as such it is not something that worries investors.

What worries investors about Alphabet is the general slowdown in the economy that will hit the online advertising business with lower prices, and then ChatGPT from OpenAI which has the potential to uproot Alphabet ’s search engine business. Microsoft ’s recent $10bn investment into OpenAI and its ChatGPT technology is seen as an offense move against Alphabet and its Alphabet business. However, Alphabet ’s AI unit DeepMind has already proclaimed that it will release its competitor to ChatGPT so the impact from ChatGPT on Alphabet ’s businesses might be limited, but the risks have definitely gone up for investors in Alphabet .