All the tech giants say their chatbot is the hot one
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Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios
Like peacocks strutting their stuff in hopes of finding a mate, the tech giants are all eager to show that their chatbot is the one with real momentum.
Why it matters: Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI have invested huge amounts of talent and money to build their models and add new features, and are eager to demonstrate that those investments are paying off.
Driving the news: A number of the leading players have shared fresh stats in the past 24 hours.
- OpenAI said Thursday that it now has 200 million weekly active users, twice the number it had last November.
- Meta said Thursday that usage of its open-source Llama model from the major cloud service providers has doubled between May and July. Mark Zuckerberg posted on Threads late Thursday that Meta AI has more than 400 million monthly active users and 185 million people who use it weekly, adding that the company has yet to launch its service in Brazil or Europe.
- Microsoft highlighted in its July earnings report that Copilot adoption has surged, with more than a 60% increase in business customers. On the consumer side, Microsoft said usage of Copilot is up more than 150% since the start of the calendar year. The company is expected to talk more about Copilot at an event on Sept. 16.
The big picture: Generative AI is still in its early days. The big task for the entire industry is to show that the products have real value, whether that's taking market share from the lucrative search industry or saving companies money through increased productivity.
- In the short term, though, everyone is eager to show they are in the lead.
- TV commercials for generative AI are now common, with Meta, Google and Microsoft all running spots (with varying success).
Between the lines: The war of words is also spilling over into the battle to sign up business customers.
- On its earnings call on Wednesday, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff took pains to distinguish Salesforce's new Agentforce AI sales assistant from Microsoft's Copilot offerings.
- "This is not Copilots," Benioff said. "So many customers are so disappointed in what they bought from Microsoft Copilots because they're not getting the accuracy and the response that they want. Microsoft has disappointed so many customers with AI."
- Microsoft quickly fired back in a comment to CNBC. "We are hearing something quite different from our Copilot for Microsoft 365 customers," corporate VP Jared Spataro said. "When I talk to CIOs directly and if you look at recent third-party data, organizations are betting on Microsoft for their AI transformation."
The bottom line: It's getting a bit feisty out there as all the big tech companies try to show they have the upper hand.
