Google's access to a much larger data set compared to its competitors in the artificial intelligence (AI) race, especially versus ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, gives the tech giant a competitive edge.
ChatGPT boasts most monthly active users, surpassing Google Gemini, but in recent months, Gemini was found to outperform ChatGPT, in terms of monthly active user growth and time spent on the chatbot, according to a US-based researcher Sensor Tower.
Google, an icon of Internet history with its search engine, diversified its offerings by investing in various technologies over the years — platforms like YouTube and the Android operating system, coupled with its internet search monopoly, grant the firm unprecedented data to train its AI.
While its data superiority allows it to have a serious edge in developing AI technologies, discussions over Google creating a tech monopoly are on the rise.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said Google has been the biggest player in Internet history, especially in the last 27 years, in an interview with US-based tech and culture magazine Wired.
Prince stated that Google developed all tools necessary to monetize traffic, and now the firm is a prominent player in AI research. He said Google combined its search engine capabilities with AI to create a massive challenge for competitors.
"Prince says Cloudflare found that Google currently sees 3.2 times more pages on the internet than OpenAI, 4.6 times more than Microsoft, and 4.8 times more than Anthropic or Meta does. Put simply, 'They have this incredibly privileged access,' " Prince says, according to the article released on Dec. 4.
Prince stated that Google's access to more data compared to competitors led Gemini to be better than ChatGPT, noting that the AI race has more to do with who has more data than to do with chips, research, or tech.
"Google is the problem here. It is the company that is keeping us from going forward on the internet, and until we force them — or hopefully convince them — that they should play by the same rules as everyone else and split their crawlers up between search and AI, I think we're going to have a hard time completely locking all the content down," he told Wired.
He noted that Cloudflare declared July 1 the "Content Independence Day," offering free tools to clients who wish to opt out from their data being used to train AI.
He added the scheme "blocked more than 400 billion AI bot requests" since.
