While Tech Giants Compete Hard, Microsoft CEO Says Google Locking Up Content Needed to Train AI

 

Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, claimed on Monday that tech titans were vying for the massive amounts of information needed to teach artificial intelligence. He also claimed that Google was securing content through pricey and exclusive arrangements with publishers.

In the first significant antitrust case the US has brought since it sued Microsoft in 1998, Nadella, the CEO of rival tech giant Microsoft, testified that the tech giants' efforts to create content libraries to train their large language models "reminds me of the early phases of distribution deals."

The US Justice Department's antitrust battle against Google centres on distribution agreements. According to the authorities, Google, which controls about 90% of the search industry, illegally pays $10 billion (around Rs 83,200 crore) a year to wireless providers like AT&T and smartphone manufacturers like Apple to be the default search engine on their products.

Google's profits are increased because of its dominance in the competitive advertising sector.

According to Nadella, creating artificial intelligence required servers with computational power and data to train the software. He responded to servers by saying, "No problem, we are happy to put in the dollars."

But he didn't include Google when he said it was "problematic" if other businesses signed exclusive contracts with significant content producers. 

"They say Google's going to write this cheque and it's exclusive and you have to match it," he said. "When I am meeting with publishers now, they say.

Apple rejected

Furthermore, Nadella stated in court that Microsoft had attempted to have its Bing search engine become the default on Apple handsets but had been turned down. 

When Microsoft was given the option to be the default search engine on PCs and mobile devices, yet a disproportionate number of people continued to use Google instead of Bing, John Schmidtlein, the chief attorney for Google, questioned Nadella on these issues.

According to Schmidtlein, Microsoft made a number of strategic mistakes that prevented Bing from gaining traction, including failing to invest in servers or developers to advance Bing and missing the mobile revolution.

Schmidtlein added that customers skipped Bing and conducted the great majority of their queries on Google as a result of Microsoft's accomplishment in becoming the default — on some Verizon phones in 2008, BlackBerry, and Nokia in 2011, and some BlackBerry phones in 2008.

Bing is the default search engine on laptops, the majority of which run Microsoft operating systems, and Nadella recognised that its market share is under 20%.

In addition, he said, "You get up in the morning, brush your teeth, and search on Google," alluding to the search engine's dominance.

Query of calibre

Nadella was questioned by Judge Amit Mehta about why Apple would move to Bing given the inferior quality of the Microsoft product in the case being heard in the US District Court for the District of Columbia.

The query shows that the judge is interested in Google's claim that its dominance is due to its quality rather than criminal activities.

Long after the computer behemoth had been sued for federal antitrust violations, Nadella was named CEO of Microsoft in 2014. This legal battle, which resulted in a settlement in 2001, pushed Microsoft to change some of its business practises and made room for businesses like Google.

The two developed a fierce rivalry as Google, which was formed in 1998 and is now the largest search engine in the market. Both use similar email services, search engines, and browsers, among many other things. Recent investments by Google in the Bard AI chatbot and significant investments by Microsoft in OpenAI have turned them into rivals in the field of artificial intelligence.