Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google: four of the biggest technology companies in the world. All of them have undoubtedly changed an aspect of our lives, but with the recent and powerful chaos that generative AI has been causing, how will these companies be affected and how will they have to adapt?

Amazon has changed the way we shop and live, to a more digitalised and personalised experience. Some of its most notable endeavours - with Alexa, Amazon Music, Amazon Prime, and the Kindle, for instance - have had mixed success in terms of profitability, but they continue to be very popular and take up a large amount of market share. Many economists argue that recent generative AI spikes have not had much effect on them, as neither have they involved themselves in it. They will likely stay wary of the dangers posed to their products and future plans. Let us consider Apple now.

When we think of Apple, we think of the iPhone, the iPad, the Mac, AirPods, the Apple Watch, and the recent Vision Pro. The clear trend (excluding the unproven, but undubitably auspicious, Vision Pro) is that these are infallibly successful product. It would be challenging to think of a product Apple has had a failure with, both in terms of profitability, and popularity and “hype”. It feels as though news of ChatGPT has not reached Cupertino. Apple has gone headfirst in refining its core products. In fact, they are also chasing Meta and their Mets Quest down, with the Vision Pro! All in all, the future is looking bright for Apple.

As for Microsoft, their investment into integrating ChatGPT into their own services – from Bing to Word – has served them well. For instance, Microsoft announced that Teams was used by 270 million users, rendering it the most popular business communication application, by a long shot: to be precise, by a difference of 252 million between it and second place Slack. They seemed to be closing out Google’s (Alphabet’s) market share. Yet, in April it was announced that they had actually lost out on market share, having even less than pre-AI Bing! GPT-3 has helped Microsoft save their business (for now). They do, though, need to reconsider their strategy.

Google, not only a household name, is a verb (and in the Oxford Dictionary too). Google has great popularity and rapport, and monopolises market share in search, holding over 92% of the market. Bard should have been the much stronger opposition to OpenAI, seeing also as Google are really the pioneers of AI and transformers. But somehow they managed to ruin a fine product a few minutes into the presentation where they showed Bard giving false information about space exploration. Google seemed to have lost out, losing 100 billion of its previous valuation. Yet, they held on and rapid growth in the product recently, as well as new features being successfully released, have led to the rise Alphabet’s stock price once more. They have vast amounts of technological infrastructure and are becoming increasingly ready to take on OpenAI.

Some companies may have found that their future is held in AI whether for better or worse. We can only guess. Others aim to stay well clear and continue to flourish.