The rapid rise in popularity of ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI, has sparked a Game of Thrones AI war between major tech companies, says a financial analyst quoted by Markets Insider.

Dan Ives, an analyst at US brokerage and financial consulting firm Wedbush Securities, says ChatGPT’s popularity has sparked an “arms race” between the tech giants, which are among the highest-rated companies on the US stock market.

“You look at what’s happened, and it’s a Game of Thrones battle between Microsoft and Google, and Apple is just watching silently so far,” he told CNBC on Tuesday.

“Everybody’s trying to figure out who’s going to be the winner,” he added, as Big Tech players tried to come up with their own answer to ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence tool that’s already been used to write scientific papers and has proven it can pass some exams in American universities.

​Microsoft announced last month that it was in talks with OpenAI to invest in the company and integrate its ChatGPT chatbot into products such as Word, Outlook and Powerpoint. In 2019, it already invested US$1 billion in OpenAI, being one of the first investors in the company. .

The cost of new investments will be 10 billion dollars.

ChatGPT ignites the race to develop artificial intelligence

The company, founded by Bill Gates, later announced that it would integrate ChatGPT technology into its Bing search engine.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said on the occasion of the announcement that we are facing a significant moment in the history of the Internet, explaining that this technology will change the way we interact with a variety of software for the better. Nadella says this moment can be attributed to an important chapter in the history of technology, along with the appearance of the first web browsers and mobile gadgets.

Meanwhile, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced that it is launching a chatbot called “Bard” to test user reactions to feedback, and that it will go live in a few weeks.

But a factual error Google made during the “Bard” presentation led to a $100 billion drop in the company’s market capitalization and speculation that the chatbot had made a hasty announcement.

Several analysts wrote that Google’s event disappointed them, they expected more, and got the impression that the chatbot will not be something unusual, but it remains to be seen what the results of the tests will be when many people can run them.