Is ChatGPT the Google "Killer"?

Replacing search engines with smart chatbot ChatGPT is likely to lead to the collapse of Google. The company risks losing all of its advertising revenue, because it will be extremely difficult to embed it in the dialogue between the user and the bot.

Recently, the most popular search engine Google suffered a serious information shock. A powerful competitor has appeared on the horizon, which, presumably, is quite capable of sending it "to the archive." According to data published in The New York Times, the ChatGPT chatbot released on November 30 by the OpenAI research laboratory was marked by Google as a "red code" (as a potential threat). Interestingly, the Google search engine has become the largest on the Internet due to the fact that it gradually attracted a significant part of users from alternative search engines (AOL, Bing, Yahoo and others) into its orbit. The latter were significantly inferior in the innovative smart search technologies, and therefore could not stand the competition. And now Google understands that the same thing can happen to it.

In a comment to The New York Times, a Google spokesperson said that AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT have the potential to destroy the entire web search industry. In addition, it will also have a very bad effect on the advertising business, which is the basis of Google's profits. Realizing the high level of threat posed by the novelty, Sundararajan Pichai, CEO of Google Inc. and Alphabet, is now in the process of building a new AI strategy.

Is it really now that in order to find information of interest on the Internet, we will write requests not to the usual Google, but to an intelligent chatbot? Probably someday it will happen. But definitely not in the near future. The fact is that AI bots like ChatGPT do not yet have well-honed skills to find the answers the user really needs on the network. The CEO of the OpenAI Lab, Samuel Altman, noted that they do an excellent job with creative tasks, but, unfortunately, their search accuracy is lame. What does ChatGPT itself think about this? In response to a question, ChatGPT clarified that it is not a search engine at all, but a Generative Pre-training Transformer (GPT) language model. This is one of the types of AI that can generate texts that are almost indistinguishable from human creativity. It does not search for the user's query like Google does. Hence, the conclusion: chatbots created on the basis of AI will not be able to replace existing search engines in the near future.

It is very difficult to make accurate forecasts now. So Google seems to have decided not to wait for one of these revolutionary breakthroughs that could send it to the margins of digital history. Google specialists are now actively working on improving the search engine using the technology that was used to create ChatGPT, LaMDA and similar intelligent chatbots.