What happened

Shares of Alphabet (GOOG 0.37%) (GOOGL 0.35%) were moving higher today as anticipation seemed to be building for the company's live event tomorrow. 

The conference comes after the company unveiled its new Bard AI search technology in a blog post yesterday.

As of 2:49 p.m. EST, the stock was up 3.6%.

So what

Alphabet actually announced its event last week, but the arms race to lead the next iteration of internet search is building quickly as Microsoft (MSFT -1.84%) announced at its own press conference this afternoon that it would launch a ChatGPT-powered version of Bing, again leveraging its partnership with OpenAI. In fact, Alphabet stock seemed to move in tandem with Microsoft, which also rose today.

Alphabet has said its event, to be held in Paris, will be about "Search, Maps, and Beyond," and investors are expecting to hear more about its plans to revamp its search product with Bard or new tools as the company's search monopoly suddenly looks vulnerable with the launch of ChatGPT.

Investors are also likely to hear about Alphabet's other AI technologies, including its large language model, LaMDA, which is similar to ChatGPT, as well as MUM, its transformer model that can understand multiple languages and pick information out from videos.

Now what

ChatGPT was launched more than two months ago, and Alphabet stock has mostly seemed unaffected by the new technology despite the threat it poses.

With today's gains in Alphabet stock, investors seem to be saying they think the search giant has the lead in artificial intelligence. We'll learn more at Alphabet's event tomorrow, which is set for 8:30 a.m. EST and will be broadcast on YouTube.