INDONESIAKININEWS.COM - ChatGPT, the new chatbot that's taken the internet by storm and already drafted unknown numbers of proposals, e...
Microsoft has not commented publicly on the subject, but a partnership between the two companies would make sense.
Microsoft has already invested $1 billion in OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, and is using OpenAI's Dall-E 2 image-generating A.I. to create images from text within Bing. It has also licensed OpenAI's text-generating software.
Assuming reports of this partnership are true, this is very, very bad news for Google. Even before word of the Bing integration leaked out, Google upper management, presumably led by CEO Sundar Pichai, had reportedly called a "code red" over ChatGPT's astonishingly fast growth in popularity since its release about six weeks ago.
"Code red" reportedly signals an existential threat, and chatbots such as ChatGPT definitely constitute such a threat to Google.
As I discovered when I tried it myself, ChatGPT can be a faster and easier way to learn about something than a Google search. And Google search can't do handy things like draft your marketing copy.
Needless to say, Google engineers are also pretty good at creating A.I., and the company has developed its own chatbot, named LaMDA, that supposedly rivals ChatGPT. LaMDA became briefly famous last summer when a Google engineer publicly claimed it was sentient.
Google says it isn't, and the rest of us can't check for ourselves because, unlike ChatGPT, LaMDA has never been widely released. Google likely won't release it to the public anytime soon.
Why not? Google employees put that very question to Pichai and head of A.I. Jeff Dean at an all-hands meeting in December.
The answer they got was that chatbots represent a "reputional risk" for companies that deploy them.
Indeed, some earlier chatbots, such as Microsoft's Tay, have come to grief when ill-meaning users trained them to say racist and offensive things, something that ChatGPT is reportedly susceptible to as well.
This is where being a smaller startup pays off, because a company like OpenAI has much less to lose from reputational risk than a well-established giant like Google does.
The real reason Google fears ChatGPT
But there's another reason Google may hesitate to release its own chatbot, and it's a problem the company can't easily solve.
Google search is supported by advertising that makes up more than 80 percent of the company's revenue.
Thus, the goal of search--from Google's point of view--is not to get you to the website you're looking for as fast as possible.
It's to show you a list of possible websites, including some that have paid to be there and that you might choose to click on.
A conversational chatbot that presents you with a list of sites isn't being very conversational or personable, so that more or less defeats the purpose of the chatbot.
A chatbot that responded conversationally with information, the way ChatGPT does, would more or less defeat the purpose of Google, which is to make money through advertising. Bing sells advertising too, but it's not Microsoft's main source of revenue.
It's easy to see why people at Google might be panicking right about now. It's the absolute market dominator in search, with about 83 percent of search traffic worldwide.
Bing is a very distant second at about 9 percent. But Google's competitors have slowly made inroads--as recently as 2019, Google had 93 percent of search traffic instead of the 83 percent it has today.
And the instant popularity of ChatGPT suggests that a search engine that incorporated some of its features and behavior might finally have the draw needed to get users to break their Googling habit.
I've never been much of a Bing user myself, but I am definitely a fan of ChatGPT.
So this spring, if ChatGPT really does become part of Bing, I may have to give it a try. I'll be fascinated to see how many of Google's regular users do the same.
Source: inc
