It is proposed to keep silent about competition – Newspaper Kommersant No. 68 (7513) of 04/19/2023

Samsung is considering changing the default search engine on its devices to Microsoft Bing, which has attracted attention for its integration with a neural network-based chatbot, according to The New York Times, citing internal Google documents. Such an opportunity, according to the publication, caused a panic at Google, and employees had to prepare a presentation of their own developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).

The Samsung maneuver could very well be a negotiating tactic. The revenue that Google receives in connection with the pre-installation of its search engine on Samsung phones is estimated at $ 3 billion. I assume that the manufacturer took advantage of the appearance, in fact, the first serious competitor of Google in the English-language search market, in order to negotiate better conditions.

The Russian search market, meanwhile, lives by different rules. Firstly, although it is divided between Yandex and Google on the part of the user, the latter has ceased commercial activities in the Russian Federation. Secondly, the issues of pre-installation of Yandex services on devices sold in the country have long been in the regulatory plane, and not in the commercial one. According to the plan for the division of Yandex’s assets, announced last year, the search business will remain with the Russian part.

Under such conditions, it is not surprising that Yandex remained the only search engine with a world-famous name that did not fully present its own neural network chat bot. Google already has it, although, according to experts, it loses to the built-in Bing. Chinese Baidu also showed a similar development on video. Yandex only announced the very fact of working on the YaLM 2.0 neural network. In the public domain, the company released only the Shedevroom image generator, a technology that is very distant from the classic functionality of a search engine. Assistant “Alisa”, despite the use of neural networks in the mode of abstract dialogues, looks for facts and solutions to problems on sites, like a classic search engine.

Many large Russian companies are experimenting with AI in one way or another, but their developments have not yet been embodied in products that make it easier to find information. The same VK carefully distances itself from this area. The Yandex search engine is used not only on the retired VK Zen, but also on Mail.ru.

But this does not mean that the holy place will remain empty. There are already examples in the world: the search engine You.com, launched in 2021, added chatbot features and increased its user base at the end of 2022. There is only one catch: the creators of a possible alternative to Yandex in the Russian Federation will have to prove their advantages not only to users and vendors, but also to government officials. And this is a completely different story.