Google’s highly anticipated “Live from Paris” event was on Wednesday. The marketing copy set high expectations: “Tune in to hear how we’re reimagining the way people search for, explore and interact with information.” Ben Thompson at Stratechery has a good summary of the outcome:
The event was, frankly, bad: the vast majority of content was a rehash of past Google I/Os, and one of the presenters even managed to forget to have a phone at hand for a demo; the new features that were announced would be available “in the coming months.” The slides seemed out of sync with presenters, as if they had just been prepared a few hours beforehand, and, well, it sure seems like the event and Sundar Pichai’s blog post introducing Bard (which you can’t yet use) were nothing more than a response to Microsoft’s Bing announcement.
Here is Martin Coulter and Greg Bensinger at Reuters with more:
Alphabet Inc lost $100 billion in market value on Wednesday after its new chatbot shared inaccurate information in a promotional video and a company event failed to dazzle, feeding worries that the Google parent is losing ground to rival Microsoft Corp.
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Google’s live-streamed presentation on Wednesday morning did not include details about how and when it would integrate Bard into its core search function. A day earlier, Microsoft held an event touting that it had already released to the public a version of its Bing search with ChatGPT functions integrated.
While it would be wildly premature to count Google out of the AI search race, their recent “code red” memo is beginning to look a little less hyperbolic.