Google is on high alert over OpenAI's ChatGPT, a conversational chatbot that is causing ripples in the tech industry. The technology, which is capable of responding to any query in a human-like manner, has already gained 100 million users in just two months, making it the fastest-growing app in history. This rapid adoption rate is a clear indicator that ChatGPT could be a disruptive force in the industry.
Google's dominance in the search market has been built on its ability to quickly and accurately provide relevant results to user queries. However, with the introduction of AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT, Google may face serious competition.
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a generative pre-trained transformer that has been trained on billions of parameters and petabytes of text. This training allows the system to generate new text in a way that mimics human understanding of a wide range of queries, and respond accordingly.
Microsoft is capitalizing on this potential by integrating ChatGPT into its search engine, Bing. This has caused panic at Google, which dominates 90% of search queries worldwide, as the integration of ChatGPT into Bing's search engine could seriously threaten its dominance in the industry.
In response, Google declared an emergency "Code Red" situation and has been holding frantic meetings to find a solution. The alarming situation seemed to pay off: the enterprise has now released The Google Bard AI chatbot in order to represent a fair competition to ChatGPT.
However, some days after the BETA release, the AI made Google lose more than US$ 100 billion on February 9th in market value after showing inaccurate information to the first question ever asked to the chatbot.
The mistake was reported by Reuters at first and it was seen on the official advertisement published by Google on Twitter. The GIF posted by the company included a question being asked to Bard: "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year old about?", as the new AI suggested that JWST was the first one to take the pictures of a planet outside Earth’s solar system, but, in fact, NASA confirmed that the Very Large Telescope (VLT) was indeed the pioneer on taking the photos in 2004, not JWST.
The partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI started in 2019 when Microsoft invested $1 billion into the company. This allowed the AI research firm to scale its operations and reduce costs, while Microsoft acquired OpenAI's intellectual property portfolio, giving it a competitive edge in the tech industry.
The integration of ChatGPT into Bing is part of Microsoft's strategy to revolutionize the way people interact with search engines.
If a search engine powered by AI can provide specific information in a concise manner and allow users to ask further questions, it would revolutionize the way people search for information.
Currently, users have to go through multiple links and waste time searching for the specific information they need, but an AI-powered search engine would synthesize the answer for them, saving them time and effort.
Google is well aware of the potential impact of ChatGPT and is already taking steps to fight back. However, it remains to be seen how this AI war will play out, and if Google will be able to maintain its dominance in the search industry.
