The folly of the AI chatbot wars

Does anyone remember the browser wars? It seems like a lifetime ago when the industry’s superpowers were locked in a contest to offer the most popular browser for “surfing the web.”

For more than five years in the 1990s Microsoft and Netscape pounded each other with a nonstop barrage of proprietary HTML tags, plugins, and decimal-level version updates that ultimately left everyone exhausted.

It sure seems like we're about to relive those days, as Microsoft (yet again), Google, Meta, and Apple, and countless startups, fight to field the best AI chatbot. On Thursday, Google released its newly renamed Gemini chatbot, which will now be available as a standalone Android app. Microsoft's riposte could come as soon as OpenAI's GPT-5 is ready for action (a date that OpenAI has so far kept mum about). And Apple has promised some kind of AI launch later this year.

The rate of advances being made in large language models is astounding, and each new generation’s improvements on things like accuracy and guardrails are very necessary. But there's also an element of folly in the escalating chatbot wars in which we now find ourselves.

That's because, as Fortune's Jeremy Kahn points out in his analysis of Google's Gemini announcement, the chatbot wars are turning into the streaming wars. Google wants people to pay $20 a month for a premium version of Gemini, which infuses the AI tech into Google productivity software like Docs and Sheets. Microsoft charges $30 a month for users who want its AI CoPilot in their productivity software. OpenAI's premium version of ChatGPT is $20 a month; even Elon Musk's X offers its Grok chatbot to users who pay for its $16 per month premium service.

How many AI subscriptions do consumers want or need? You can call it an “assistant,” a “copilot,” or an AI with a "rebellious streak,” as Grok bills itself, but in the end, these bots aren't really all that different in what they actually do. And just as it's tough to justify paying for a half dozen different streaming video services, or more than a single streaming music service, it's hard to envision a world where I need multiple chatbots on my payroll.

There's more to AI large language models than chatbots of course. The value and utility of the technology is likely to manifest itself in unexpected ways as the industry matures. And that's crucial because when the dust settles on the chatbot wars, we may find we've invested obscene amounts of money, time, and attention to creating a commodity.

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Alexei Oreskovic

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com