Google Exec Says Microsoft Concession is 'Too Little, Too Late as EU Continues Antitrust Probe, Teams AI Library to Launch Next Month
A Google executive has described Microsoft's concession to unbundle Teams from its Office suite as "too little, too late".
Google executive Amit Zavery, Vice President, General Manager and Head of Platform at Google Cloud, spoke to The Register about why he maintained the unbundling offer wouldn't work. Zavery highlighted that it would only apply to the European Economic Area:
I don’t even know how Microsoft can justify this. The funny part to me, as a vendor, is to be able to say [to a customer with a] straight face, ‘You know what, we’ll do this for this particular country or region, and it’s the same issue for the rest of the world, but we will not do it for the rest of the world’… What’s the reason for that?"
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported this week that the European Commission will continue its antitrust investigation of Microsoft's bundling of the two products after considering the concession insufficient. The regulatory body is preparing a statement of objections to send to Microsoft, which will likely come in the next few months.
In other Teams news this week, the platform is launching its AI library next month to allow developers to build AI-powered tools and improve worker productivity.
The library is a suite of code functionalities to help integrate large language models (LLMs) into Teams, enabling developers to build sophisticated conversational Teams apps. The Teams AI library will also include features for producing bots, message extensions and adaptive cards to aid in the integration of LLMs. This means developers can leverage the latest updates to AI to enhance their app functionality.
Google Reportedly Near Release of GPT-4 Competitor, Gemini
Google is allegedly nearing the release of its GPT-4 competitor LLM, Gemini.
As first reported by The Information, Google has provided a small group of businesses access to an early version of Gemini, indicating it could meet its mooted December 2023 release date.
Gemini is billed as Google's flagship AI and a competitor with OpenAI's GPT-4 — the company has claimed that Gemini has five times greater computational power than GPT-4.
While Google's assertion that Gemini's computational power dwarfs GPT -4's remains unsubstantiated for now, the solution has several differentiators that have been confirmed. Gemini was built with multimodal processing in mind. This means it can process images and text, and it has been suggested that it will also be able to generate context-sensitive images and texts in answers to prompts.
