You may have heard about ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot made obtainable to the public at the end of this November. I’d heard about people using the service to write their school essays, and I was curious how it could help me in my everyday life.
OpenAI, a research firm backed by Microsoft and others, created the technology. ChatGPT generates text in an advanced and creative manner based on written prompts. It can even carry on a conversation that feels very much like one with a human being.
This made me wonder if ChatGPT is intelligent enough to change how we find information online.
Could it eventually supplant Google and other search engines?
Some Google employees are undoubtedly concerned about the possibility. Employees recently asked executives at a company all-hands meeting last week, CNBC’s Jen Elias reported, if an AI chatbot like ChatGPT was a “missed opportunity” for the company.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, and Jeff Dean, long-time head of Google’s AI division, respond by saying that the company has similar abilities but that the cost if something goes wrong is higher because people must trust the answers they get from Google.
On Monday, December 12, Morgan Stanley published a report on the subject, examining whether ChatGPT poses a threat to Google. Brian Nowak, the bank’s lead analyst on Alphabet, write that the language model could take market share “and disrupt Google’s position as the entry point for people on the Internet.”
However, Nowak stated that the firm remains confident in Google’s position because the company is continually improving search, and creating behavioral change is a significant challenge because many internet users use Google as a habit. Furthermore, Google is “developing similar natural language models such as LaMDA” that could be used in new products.
