Google CEO applauds Microsoft CEO’s ‘We Made Them Dance’ remark
“And I want people to know that we made them dance, and I think it will be a great day,” Nadella said in February 2023 after launching the revamped Bing search engine he created with OpenAI.
But Google CEO Sundar Pichai likes to listen to his own music, he said in a new interview with Bloomberg published Wednesday.
“One of the ways to do a bad thing is to listen to noise and jam to someone else’s dance music,” Pichai said in the interview, in response to Nadella’s remarks.
Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment.
Microsoft announced its “new Bing”, powered by OpenAI in February 2023. Nadella previously told The Verge that it had waited 20 years to compete with Google and that it “should have been the default winner” of the race Big Tech AI.
Despite Google’s early investments in AI and all its resources and talent, Microsoft has begun to lead the AI race by partnering with OpenAI and the new Bing and 365 Copilot, an AI-based productivity tool. AI for Microsoft applications.
Meanwhile, Google was caught off guard.
When ChatGPT launched in 2022, Google would have issued a “code red” to employees of the potential threat to its research activity. The company has also refocused its AI strategy in the wake of new competition.
Shortly after, Google launched its AI chatbot Bard, now called Gemini. Later, when it announced upgrades, Google faced almost immediate backlash due to the inaccurate depictions of historical figures created by the image generator tool.
But the tech giant is catching up, capitalizing on its massive user base to promote its AI products.
Google recently announced that it is building its own AI chips. It’s also ramping up its AI efforts with a series of cloud advancements, the general availability of TPU v5p, the new Gemini 1.5 release, and various AI additions to Google Workspace.
The company has also restructured its teams and reduced its workforce over the past year to make room for its biggest priorities, namely the advancement of AI. In 2023, Google cut its workforce by about 6%, and thousands of layoffs have occurred in waves so far in 2024.
Pichai told Bloomberg that AI is in its early stages and competition is still a part of working in the tech space.
“It’s happening at a faster pace, but you know that technological change tends to accelerate over time,” Pichai said in the interview. “So it doesn’t surprise me at all.”
“I think we have a clear idea of what we need to do,” Pichai added.
Meanwhile, Google still dominates search over Bing – something Nadella has acknowledged since his remarks about making his rival dance.
“I think when you have 3% of the global market share and you’re competing with someone who has 97%, even a small gain here and there is an exciting moment,” Nadella told Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Business Insider’s parent company, Axel. Springer, in an interview in October. “But Google is a very strong company, and it’s going to come out strong.”
“Google has a number of structural advantages here: they already have the share, they control Android, they control Chrome,” Nadella added. “I always say that Google makes more money from Windows than all of Microsoft. This keeps us grounded.”
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