In January, Microsoft said it would invest $US10 billion ($14.4 billion) in OpenAI, on top of a prior investment, promising new AI tools for consumers and enterprise. Then on February 1, it announced the first of these: models powered by GPT that would sit in on Teams video calls, keeping track of who said what to whom, generating summaries, mailing out to-do lists and making personalised recaps. It also said AI features were coming soon to virtually all its productivity software, including Office.

Google responded on February 6, saying it was leveraging LaMDA to create the next version of Google Search; an agent called Bard that would sit on top of regular search results and respond to your inquiry in conversation.

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The next day, Microsoft confirmed it was making an AI search bot of its own, based on a next-generation version of GPT, as part of its web browser Edge and its search engine Bing, and there were preview versions available immediately.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella clearly sees an opportunity here to make a surprise play for Google’s biggest crown, and he hasn’t bothered mincing words.

“We are grounded in the fact that Google dominates this space,” he told the Wall Street Journal this week.

“A new race is starting with a completely new platform technology. I’m excited for users to have a choice, finally.”

He went even further in an interview with The Verge.

“[Google are] the 800-pound gorilla in this. That is what they are. And I hope that, with our innovation, they will definitely want to come out and show that they can dance,” he said.

“And I want people to know that we made them dance, and I think that’ll be a great day.”

With technology from the company that kicked off this chatbot craze, and versions of its product already accessible by members of the public, Microsoft currently enjoys a perceived advantage over Google. It has heaps of resources, and is attacking a massive market (in search) where it’s long had a comparatively small market share.

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Any users it can convert over from Google to Bing (which admittedly is a big ask from a brand familiarity perspective alone) could be hugely valuable, especially if the interest in AI boosts increases demands for ads on the search engine. And in response, Google can only develop better AI and features, which actually benefits everyone in the space as the current issues with generative search are collectively figured out.

On the other hand, those issues are not inconsequential.

Beyond the potential for people to use the technology for nefarious purposes, the entire point of an AI searchbot is that responses are generated on demand, meaning nobody actually knows what it might say until it says it.

Companies will need to build in automatic content moderation, the ability to detect abuse, and a way to explain to users what’s actually happening and why. That includes reminding them that delivering 100 per cent factual information is not something chatbots can currently do — as demonstrated by Google on Wednesday, when a factual error was spotted in its own promotional video for Bard, prompting a $US100 billion sell-off of its parent Alphabet’s shares.

It’s clear that chatting to language model agents is the future of asking for information, and it’s easy to see how it could be adapted for verbal conversations. But given the amount of time it will still take before it can be used reliably and safely, there’s no way to know which tech giant will come out on top.

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