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Alphabet Gains the Upper Hand
By: Bespoke Investment Group | August 14, 2023

The writing has been on the wall all year - Microsoft beat Google to the punch, and despite its past dominance, with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, Google was destined to take a backseat to Microsoft in the AI boom. The list of articles below is just a sampling of the ink and pixels that have been spent documenting the impeding collapse of Google and the rise of Microsoft in online search and business productivity tools:

"Thanks to OpenAI, Microsoft is beating Google in the artificial intelligence game" - Vox, 1/26/23
"Microsoft packs Bing search engine, Edge browser with AI in big Challenge to Google" - Reuters, 2/7/23
"Thanks to ChatGPT, Microsoft can finally beat Google" - Business Insider, 2/7/23
"'AI First' To Last: How Google Fell Behind In The AI Boom" - Forbes, 2/8/23
"Investors' query: Can Google answer Microsoft's AI threat" - AP News, 2/8/23
"How Google Ran Out of Ideas" - The Atlantic, 2/16/23
"How Google Became Cautious of AI and Gave Microsoft an Opening" - Wall Street Journal, 3/7/23
"Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals" - New York Times, 4/16/23
"Google Lost $57 Billion in One Day, Because Microsoft is Leading the AI Race" - Robb Report, 4/18/23
"Microsoft 'holding a lot of the cards' in AI-powered search war with Google" - Yahoo Finance, 4/26/23

For much of the first half of 2023, shares of Microsoft (MSFT) outperformed the overall market and Google parent Alphabet (GOOGL) based on the sentiment of the articles above and ones like them. Back in early February, when Alphabet rushed its AI answer to Microsoft's Bing powered by ChatGPT, the company lost more than $100 billion in market value in a single day after Bard gave a factually incorrect answer during its introduction to the world. It looked like a major PR disaster for Alphabet management, but Bard's error shed light on a a key aspect of AI chat bots in general, namely that they all have a tendency to give wrong answers. Even when it comes to queries involving seemingly straightforward arithmetic, ChatGPT often gets the answer wrong.

Just as ChatGPT increasingly gives wrong information, the obituaries for Google also turned out to be wrong, as last week, shares of GOOGL surpassed MSFT in terms of performance since the launch of ChatGPT. Through late morning on Monday (8/14), GOOGL was up just under 30% (29.6%) compared to MSFT's gain of 26.4%. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but we found it interesting that the most recent peak in MSFT's stock came within days of the headline below.

"ChatGPT users fall for first time, spurring questions about AI boom" - Washington Post, 7/7/23



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