Google and I have birthdays that are fairly close together - a few years apart, at most.
Google is celebrating its 25th birthday this month (the thought of lighting up more candles on my cake feels daunting) - and has noticed a tremendous shift in technology since 1998 when founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin created the company.
When Google first came onto the scene, it was solely a search engine, and during its first few months of existence it was based in the garage of Susan Wojcicki, who would eventually become the CEO of YouTube.
No prompting from me is necessary to acknowledge the success of that search engine. For 17 years, the word 'Google' has been included in the dictionary. I recall a BBC debate as to whether using it as a verb during a broadcast should be allowed given the possibility of advertising the company for free.
Being now under a larger parent organization, Alphabet, that company has extended into almost every sector of tech and commands several markets in a way that has raised issues among anti-trust officials. Currently, it is attempting to gain top spot in the AI competition - but some claim it is already lagging.
Email, phones, apps, hardware, driverless vehicles, digital aids, and YouTube - Google has created (and acquired) many items and services. Unfortunately, not all of them have been successful.
The Killed by Google website lists 288 decommissioned projects, such as Stadia (gaming platform) and Google Cardboard (budget VR headset).
It is now an issue to consider if Google can keep its widespread presence in the quickly transforming realm of artificial intelligence.
People have been whispering, including those within the company, that Google has lagged. An internal Google memo by an engineer appeared online, which stated that the company did not have any "special knowledge" when it comes to AI, and did not stand a chance of winning the competition.
This sensation was strengthened further by the robots' fight.
For a great many individuals, the initial protracted experience where they were conscious of AI and were astounded by it was ChatGPT, the viral AI chatbot that became popular around the globe in November 2022.
OpenAI, its creator, has benefitted from billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft. This money is now being used in developing Microsoft products like Bing search engine and Office 365.
ChatGPT has been referred to as the "Google killer" due to its capability of providing an answer to a query in one response, as opposed to returning numerous pages of search results.
A language-processing architecture named transformer, created by Google, did not have the same effect when Google later revealed its own similar product named Bard a few months afterwards.
Bard was given a launch which was surprisingly cautious. It was not for those under 18 years old, according to the tech giant, and a high ranking executive referred to it as "an experiment”.
Perhaps some of its wariness stemmed from the peculiar situation that had preceded Bard's arrival.
A Large Language Model (LLM) serves as the basis of a chatbot. Google's initial LLM was known as Lamda.
The engineer that had toiled on the project became certain that it exhibited signs of sentience. He released long accounts of discussions that he believed showed Lamda was expressing genuine feelings and reflections.
This is precisely the kind of task which an LLM is qualified to complete - creating writing that appears to originate from a human. Google has always denied that Lamda was doing anything else, and subsequently the engineer was let go.
Despite creating headlines around the world, and heightening nervousness about AI long before the issue became popular, Google likely would have rather avoided being part of the story.
Certainly, Google has not abandoned their efforts. At the IO developers conference in May, the tech giant revealed 25 new products powered by Artificial Intelligence. An announcement on their website stated that they are "at the forefront of advancing the frontier of AI". They own the UK-based AI firm DeepMind, and its AlphaFold AI program holds a great potential to quicken the process of finding new drugs.
Chirag Dekate from Gartner attended Google Next in August, a gathering devoted to Artificial Intelligence.
He claims that Google is preparing to be a leader in the up-and-coming Generative AI market.
Carolina Milanesi from Creative Strategies doesn't believe we should dismiss Google AI too hastily.
She does not subscribe to the idea that "they missed the boat on AI," she asserts.
They have the potential to capitalize on AI for both consumer and business use.
Susannah Streeter, the leader of the money and markets division at Hargreaves Lansdown investor, concurs.
She suggests that Google's advantage in the AI space could be its ability to leverage its cloud business to provide access to networks of powerful computers and processing power that are hard for other companies to manage individually.
Alphabet is placing itself in a prime spot to be a major part of the AI revolution because of the strong need from various companies to modernize infrastructure and storage in order to meet the significant requirements for generative AI operations," she explains.
Although it is the least sizable out of the three leading cloud providers - Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and itself - it still makes an impact.
Tim Dowling, a journalist, recounted his experience of attempting to organise a trip to the movies without Google's consumer services for a period of seven days. He compared this task to trying to shop in the dark, utilizing only a candle for light.
If even a small portion of Google's AI products succeed in assimilating themselves in the same manner, then it should be able to sustain itself financially.
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