AI War: Who is Winning?

Hello, and welcome to another edition of this newsletter.

Google announced last week that it is selling its Domains business to Squarespace, for a reported sum of $180 million. That’s peanuts for Google, but still 10 million domains are impacted.

Customers are not happy.

Many took to Twitter to complain - they liked the convenience of buying and using Google Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Drive etc.) and Domains from one shop.

Funnily, Google domains had come out of beta just last year 🤷 

Google’s VP and GM of merchant shopping says the sale is to “Sharpen our focus”

Sharpen focus to what?

By all accounts Google wants to focus more on AI - specifically taking on ChatGPT with its own AI product - Google Bard.

How’s that going for Google? We explore that in this week’s chart.

ChatGPT vs. Google Bard

Google’s Bard - its  AI competitor to ChatGPT - didn’t have a very good start

It messed up in its first public demo - answering a question wrong (link)

Things haven’t been as rosy since (Seriously, with a name like that, what chance does it even have?)

Google initially had a waitlist for Bard for about 7 weeks, and then on May 10, 2023 opened access to public in 180 countries worldwide.

However, the most recent usage data suggest that ChatGPT is leaving Bard in the dust.

In the last 4 weeks, ending June 19, 2023:

• ChatGPT had 1.58 billion visits to its Webapp (chat.openai.com) worldwide. In comparison, Google bard (bard.google.com) had a measly 139 million visits

• Perhaps, Bard is still ramping up its coverage worldwide. However, back home in US too, its quite far behind ChatGPT - Bard had 75% fewer visits compared to ChatGPT

• Users also seem to be spending way less time on Bard compared to ChatGPT (~2 mins 41 seconds less per visit). Further, 55% leave only after visiting one page (As shown by bounce rate)

You can make the argument that ChatGPT has a head start and that Google will catch up.

But the reality is that its Google who has had a head start on AI - it has been “AI first” since 2016 and has over 5K people working on AI (Link). In contrast, OpenAI has less than 500 people.

Will Bard be able to catchup or has ChatGPT already won? The war is far from over but ChatGPT definitely has a dominant position.

Business Quiz

Here is this week’s question. Tune into next week’s email to see the Answer.

Answer to last post’s business quiz question (see post):

• Saudi Arabia’s Aramco is the only non-American company with over $1 Trillion in market cap (Source)

• 40% of you got it right! The highest ever so far. Kudos! 👏👏 

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! 👋