Why Google Thinks It Can Catch Up to ChatGPT
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AI requires a lot of compute power, and the cost for your AI workloads can spiral. That is, unless you're running on OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This was the cloud built for AI, a blazing fast enterprise-grade platform for your infrastructure, database, apps, and all of your AI workloads. Right now, Oracle can cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI. Minimum financial commitment and other terms apply. Offer ends March 31st.

See if you qualify at oracle.com slash wallstreet. Oracle.com slash wallstreet. Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, January 21st. I'm Belle Lynn for The Wall Street Journal. Is your iPhone storage constantly full? Mine is. We'll find out how to get rid of pesky storage hogs and help extend the time between purging your phone. And then bring on the chatbot wars.

Google has a bold new goal for its Gemini chatbot, and that includes surpassing the capabilities and usership of its rival, OpenAI's chat GPT. Our reporter Miles Krupa tells us why Google is in it to win it.

But first, iPhone storage creep. It's a nefarious thing. It's been happening on our devices for the past 10 years or so. As our cameras have gotten better, the sizes of our photos and videos have gotten higher, and the software updates have gotten bigger too. Now, with AI coming to our devices, it really just means we have less space to work with. So what can we do about it? Our personal tech columnist, Nicole Nguyen, has a few suggestions.

Okay, Nicole, let's talk about ways to manage the space hogs. What are some of your top tips? So this is not necessarily a tip, but it's something that you can do, which is just throw money at the problem and buy a new phone and pay $100 or $200 more for the next tier. 128 gigabytes is the base model. But I don't think that's enough for most people who have been taking photos for many, many years.

512 is the next step, and that's probably the sweet spot for most people. My first primary tip is to go to the Settings app. You go to General and then iPhone Storage, and it gives you a really nice graph of what's taking up a lot of space on your phone. You can also scroll down to see recommendations. So you can review recommendations.

super large attachments that are messages, which is fantastic low-hanging fruit because the photos that are sent in messages probably live elsewhere in your camera roll or they're backed up somewhere else. So you can definitely delete those. And also a list of apps in the order of the space that they take. And that allows you to

Either dig into that app to see if you can compress some of those files or delete them. Or from that settings page, you can tap on the app name, say it's podcasts, and delete offenders right from that page. But no one's deleting the Tech News briefing podcast, right? No. You can delete episodes you've already listened to. Okay, that's okay with us.

So once you've identified the apps that are the biggest culprits, the attachments, the files, what else can you do after that? Photos is going to be a huge problem for a lot of people. And this plan that I'm about to lay out may seem like the nuclear option because how dare you take off all the photos on my phone. But it's where people need to be if they want to reset what's happening in their digital lives and start afresh.

What I recommend is not using iCloud Photos to backup your digital library.

And this is because of a few complicated reasons. One is that if you delete a photo from your camera roll from your photo library on your phone, it also deletes that photo from the cloud. I recommend instead using Google Photos, which has great search, and it also has this magical free up space button that deletes the local copy once it's backed up to Google.

you do need to pay for extra Google photo storage beyond the 15 gigabytes, and that starts at $30 a year for 200 gigabytes. Another option is Amazon Photos, which does come with Amazon Prime membership. You get unlimited full-resolution photo storage,

but you do not get unlimited video storage. So you do have to pay up for that. These are all great tips. But do you have any hacks? And if so, tell us what your favorite iPhone storage hack is. These aren't really hacks, but they are very easy to turn on settings that can make a big difference. One is called High Efficiency, and you'll find this in the Settings app under Camera.

And what high efficiency does is it compresses the photo and video sizes of the media that you capture. Another one is to auto delete messages in your message history.

Images, because they're sent at full resolution when you send them through iMessage, it takes up a ton of space because it's an extra copy that also lives in messages. And you can also turn on another setting called offload unused apps, which basically just uninstalls forgotten apps on your phone. That was our personal tech columnist, Nicole Nguyen.

Coming up, it's Google versus OpenAI. But which chatbot will come out on top? We'll find out why Google is fighting hard for the crown. That's after the break.

AI requires a lot of compute power, and the cost for your AI workloads can spiral. That is, unless you're running on OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This was the cloud built for AI, a blazing fast enterprise-grade platform for your infrastructure, database, apps, and all of your AI workloads. Right now, Oracle can cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI. Minimum financial commitment and other terms apply. Offer ends March 31st.

See if you qualify at oracle.com slash wallstreet. oracle.com slash wallstreet. Google is shooting for the stars with a new goal. According to our reporting, CEO Sundar Pichai recently told Google employees that he wants its Gemini chatbot to hit 500 million users by the end of this year.

But Google's goal might not be as much of a moonshot as it sounds. For more on Google's ambitions, we're joined by our reporter, Myles Krupa. So Myles, 500 million users sounds like an ambitious target, right? Yeah, it is a lot. In some ways, it's not a lot when you think about Google has seven products with more than 2 billion users. So it's only a quarter of that. But

You know, these artificial intelligence chatbots are still a very new thing. And for reference, OpenAI has said they have about 300 million weekly users of its chatbots. So Sundar is aiming for something a bit higher than that. But also it's safe to assume that ChatGPT's user base will also keep growing this year. And we should note that News Corp, owner of the Wall Street Journal, has a content licensing partnership with OpenAI. Yeah.

So, Miles, why does Google believe its Gemini chatbot can surpass the usership of ChatGPT? Google has a few advantages in this sort of AI race. We're starting to see them lean into it.

a little bit. So one of them is they have all these partnerships with mobile phone makers that use Android, including Samsung, Motorola. And that's one way that Google can promote the Gemini chatbot is through these mobile phones. When you take them out of the box, either having Gemini be the default mobile assistant or

or even just having it be on the home screen. There are different ways Google can promote the Gemini chatbot through different deals with these mobile phone manufacturers. And then, of course, Google owns the most popular browser in the world, the most popular search engine. The Google search app is widely used on iPhones. It has all these different surfaces it can use to promote the chatbot.

And what about from a capabilities perspective? What we've seen over the past year is Google doing a pretty good job of catching up to OpenAI on the sort of AI technology frontier, the underlying large language models that power these chatbots. By various measures, Google has reached or even surpassed what OpenAI has put out. There's a popular ranking called Chatbot Arena.

And Google actually leapfrogged OpenAI on that ranking in December. And so the first thing is that the underlying models are getting better. And then

We've seen a few different things in terms of sort of product innovation from Google with the Gemini chatbot. They unveiled this new feature called deep research that's been getting pretty good early reviews. It basically goes and searches the web for a few minutes and returns a bunch of sources in a kind of research report format. So you're starting to see them figure out on the product front how they can differentiate themselves from chat GPT.

Why does the Gemini usership or its feature set even matter? And why does it matter for Google for it to become better than ChatGPT?

You go back to the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, and it was kind of a shock to Google that they hadn't seen in a while. It wasn't making any money. It was still hallucinating quite a lot, but you could see the potential for ChatGPT and these AI chatbots to change the way that people access information online. And Google had been working on similar things for many years, but

didn't quite get to the point where they felt they could release it to the public. So what you're seeing now, even still in 2025, is this continued evolution in how people access information online and this sort of broader question of how that will disrupt Google search. And so Google isn't quite ready to just sort of seed this chatbot market to open AI and other competitors. It needs to have

a strong presence. It needs to have a strong product just because who knows how consumer behavior will change over the next five to 10 years. That was our reporter, Myles Krupa. And that's it for Tech News Briefing. Today's show was produced by Julie Chang with supervising producer, Katherine Milsop. Logging off, I'm Belle Lin for The Wall Street Journal. We'll sign back in this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.

AI requires a lot of compute power, and the cost for your AI workloads can spiral. That is, unless you're running on OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This was the cloud built for AI, a blazing fast enterprise-grade platform for your infrastructure, database, apps, and all of your AI workloads. Right now, Oracle can cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI. Minimum financial commitment and other terms apply. Offer ends March 31st.

See if you qualify at oracle.com slash wallstreet. oracle.com slash wallstreet.