Contributing Writer
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Scott Nover
Contributing Writer
Scott Nover is the lead writer for GZERO AI. He's a contributing writer for Slate and was previously a staff writer at Quartz and Adweek. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Fast Company, Vox.com, and The Washington Post, among other outlets. He currently lives near Washington, DC, with his wife and pup.
Aug 06, 2024
In Microsoft’s latest annual report, it listed its competitors. Among them, you’ll find the usual suspects: Apple and Google’s operating systems compete with Windows; Slack and Zoom compete with Office; and Nintendo and Sony compete with Xbox. But on the artificial intelligence and search engine front, the company listed a curious name: OpenAI. It’s curious because Microsoft has poured $13 billion into OpenAI and until recently held a nonvoting seat on the ChatGPT maker’s board.
The move comes amid two notable currents: First, OpenAI recently announced a search engine product called SearchGPT, though it’s still a prototype. That product genuinely could compete with the Bing search engine. But more importantly, antitrust regulators are sniffing around the relationship between the two companies, looking for anticompetitive behavior. Both the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority and the US Federal Trade Commission are investigating the two companies — so much that Microsoft recently ditched its OpenAI board seat.
So, are the two AI giants friends or foes? Well, it’s complicated.
