We are living in the AI age, and the biggest tech companies around the world are fighting to gain the first spot in this race. But at the same time, big names such as Apple and Google are late to the party as compared to the likes of Microsoft. Recently, an antitrust case was being heard by Judge Amit Mehta. After the proceeding, Judge Mehta ruled that Google is a monopolist in the search market due to its dominance.
The company might file an appeal against the antitrust decision. This can delay regulatory actions against it. However, experts suggest that Google should start worrying now because there’s competition from OpenAI’s SearchGPT tool. Even a former Google engineer has said that the search engine giant’s real competition lies in the AI space.
Google has all the resources, no doubt about that. But despite that, it hasn’t been able to gain the top spot in the current AI race. A recent example is Google’s AI Overviews. It received a lot of backlash for errors, such as recommending harmful actions. This shows that the company is sort of underprepared.
Also read: Google ruled an illegal monopoly: Impact on future of Search and Big Tech
According to industry experts like Paul Buchheit, Google lost its focus on AI when its parent company, Alphabet, reorganised and appointed Sundar Pichai as CEO in 2015. Since then, the emphasis has shifted towards maintaining search dominance rather than focusing on AI innovations.
And that focus might not be the best right now. Currently, Google is facing new threats from AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot, which provide direct answers to queries. So its dominance in the search engine space is under attack. Users might feel enticed towards these newer tools and might shift loyalties. Hence, Google really needs to pull up its socks if it wishes to continue having its “monopoly”.