- Bill Gates said in a podcast that Google’s search engine profits could plummet as Microsoft moves to AI.
- Gates said AI is “the biggest thing of this decade” and could reshape the tech space.
- Microsoft has unveiled an AI-powered Bing in a challenge to Google’s search engine dominance.
Bill Gates – the co-founder of tech giant Microsoft – said Google’s search engine profits are set to fall in the future as the company he co-founded has been able to scale rapidly on intelligence artificial.
Gates spoke in a Monday episode of “In Good Company”, a podcast hosted by Norwegian sovereign wealth fund boss Nicolai Tangenwhen he said, “Google owns all of the search profits, so the search profits will be down, and their share might be down because Microsoft was able to move on that one pretty quickly. “
For context, Google posted $224 billion in advertising revenue in 2022 — far dwarf Microsoft $18 billion in ad revenue.
Earlier in February, Gates had said Forbes that AI is “just as important as the PC, as the Internet”. On the podcast, he admitted to being surprised at how the development of AI has accelerated over the past year, but said it would be “the biggest thing of this decade”.
His comments came two weeks later Microsoft unveiled an AI-powered version of its Bing search engine, which presents itself as a challenger to Google’s dominance in the search space.
Google has dominated search in the past two decades and according to web analytics service Statistics counterit accounts for around 93% of the global search engine market, while Bing accounts for around 3%.
Just as Microsoft launched Bing, Alphabet – Google’s parent company – also unveiled an artificial intelligence service called Bard. The new Bing and Bard are open to test users.
While Gates said on the podcast that he’s “not sure” there will be a winner in the AI race, at least one prominent analyst – Dan Ives of Wedbush– said Microsoft is “leading the pack” in the AI race right now.
What Gates ultimately envisions for integrating AI into search engines is a “personal agent” that understands user requirements and style – replacing the need for separate services from different tech companies, like what is happening currently with search dominating Google, Amazon owning shopping, Microsoft owning productivity tools, and Apple owning the device market.
“A decade from now, we won’t think of these companies as separate anymore, because the AI will know you so well that when you’re buying gifts or planning trips, it doesn’t care if Amazon has the best price, if anyone else has a better price — you won’t even have to think about it,” Gates said on the podcast. “So this is quite a dramatic potential reshuffle in the way tech markets look.”