Paul Buccheit, the man behind Gmail, thinks ChatGPT has the power to overtake Google in just a couple of years. He says ChatGPT will make search, Google’s most profitable product, irrelevant. Even if Google were to step up their AI game, Paul thinks they couldn’t fully use it without hurting their most valuable part of the business.
ChatGPT, created by OpenAI, has been all the rage since it launched in November 2022. It’s a chatbot that uses AI to chat and understand text like a human. The best part? It can converse naturally, which was once Google’s forte. The results have been crazy impressive and usage has skyrocketed globally. So much so that OpenAI is now considering a paid version.
According to Buccheit’s twitter, “Google may be only a year or two away from total disruption. AI will eliminate the Search Engine Result Page, which is where they make most of their money,” adding that “even if they catch up on AI, they can’t fully deploy it without destroying the most valuable part of their business!”
It’s no surprise that the success of ChatGPT has set off alarm bells at Google headquarters, with CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly issuing a “code red” and reaching out to co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to speed up Google’s AI projects. The New York Times reported that Google plans to release a chatbot version of its search engine this year and is working on over 20 AI products to compete with ChatGPT. More information is expected at the upcoming Google I/O 2023 conference.
ChatGPT is built on GPT-3.5, a big language model that uses deep learning techniques to provide detailed answers and responses to questions across multiple subjects. Its main purpose is for human-like conversations, but it can do so much more like writing computer programs, poetry, and more. Unlike its predecessor that only used text prompts, ChatGPT (or GPT-3.5) offers a more engaging experience.
But let’s be real, ChatGPT isn’t perfect. OpenAI has admitted that sometimes it spits out answers that sound good but are actually wrong or don’t make sense. And since it doesn’t know much about anything that’s happened after 2021, there’s a chance it might spread misinformation or have some biases. At least for now.
