Tech Rivalries Are Getting Feisty Again

The year was 2008 or so and Silicon Valley was in full swing. As an internet reporter—this is back when most of the internet companies were under one beat—it was my job to cover announcements out of Google, Yahoo, Facebook and the other rising tech giants. And I was pretty busy. Facebook was expanding to new geographies, and Google responded to the social networking upstart by previewing its own Facebook killer. (Remember Google+? OpenSocial?) Facebook added new photo capabilities and Google relaunched image search. I spent my days pingponging from campus to campus for press conference after press conference. As a recent transplant from New York at the time, I dictated a lot of stories to editors while driving around in my Toyota Prius. It was pretty fun. 

And I could feel some of that excitement in the air this week as Google previewed some of the ways it plans to add artificial intelligence to Google Docs and Gmail just ahead of Microsoft doing the same today with Copilot. I also feel it in the daily barrage of headlines about startups integrating AI. It’s a war of press releases and demos.