Microsoft brought Google to dance

Redmond hadn't seen such satisfaction since Macworld Expo in 1997, when Steve Jobs announced Apple's deal with Microsoft, with the Orwellian image of Bill Gates smiling on the huge screen in the background.

Then Jobs had asked his archrival to invest $150 million to save the company he had founded in 1976, and from which he had been banished 12 years earlier.

We already know how that ended.

Last week, Microsoft and OpenAI made their relationship official by celebrating the wedding of the Bing search engine with GPT-4, the latest model of the product that has triggered the race to dominate the artificial intelligence (AI) market.

And the level of testosterone in the air was so high that the groom's father, the usually no-nonsense and conciliatory Satya Nadella,

He said he hopes the new Bing will prompt Google to show that it dances too.

And he added: "I want people to know that we were the ones who made him dance."

And danced.

In a pathetic attempt to ruin the wedding, Google announced Bard, its own ChatGPT.

It was a few hours before, with a

so hasty that poor Bard answered the only question in the demo wrong, which was a GIF.

Alphabet shares plunged 8%, but not because of Bard's mistake, but because the market had smelled fear of him.

Google develops AI, but it cannot reinvent its search engine by integrating a chatbot without putting its business in crisis.

Offering millions of hierarchical responses allows you to capitalize on multiple formats: optimization, sponsored,

, videos... Bing offers a single response with a link to sources, but its goal is not to get you to click on the maximum number of links, but rather to return you to Windows, starting with your search engine and your browser.

In 2003, Explorer occupied 95% of the market;

today Microsoft Edge is a meager 3.37%.

The war with Google is primitive, but the courtship with OpenAI is recent.

Nadella invested a billion dollars in the

in 2019 and another 10,000 million last January.

But above all, Microsoft Azure is the home of a project that has grown faster than any other

in history.

A professor at the University of Maryland estimated that the cost of maintaining ChatGPT with one million users is three million dollars a month, and now it has an unknown number between 30 and 100 million.

The Redmond wedding allows them to scale the business without breaking the bank on rent.

It is a personal triumph for Nadella, the CEO who in 10 years transformed the defeated Microsoft into a cloud services company, second only to Amazon Web Services, ahead of Google Cloud.

And a stellar maneuver by Sam Altman, the father of the bride, a 37-year-old man who, at the head of the Y Combinator accelerator, learned the lessons of Steve Jobs and also those of Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried.

Google will regret dancing at this wedding instead of waiting for the marriage to founder and the product to crash, like Tesla's Autopilot.

There's always someone younger and hungrier than you coming down the ladder after you, but if you dive, you needlessly lose first.

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