Ai is being massively explored these days to know its capabilities. ChatGPT being one of the most trending topics in AI has started heating up arguments. Reports said that Google alerted a ‘Code Red’ situation in its offices in December 2022. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, gained massive popularity after it was made available for testing to the chatbot on social media. Be it a coding project or be it any degree or composing poetry, ChatGPT is excelling in all its job so far. And maybe, that is bothering Google a bit too much.
Google has been dominating search engines for a long time, and now it is being challenged by ChatGPT and its partner, Microsoft. The CEO – Satya Nadella of Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI and is also strengthening their relations and partnership. Microsoft wants to revolutionize the way people use search engines and thus has announced ‘Bing’ developed by the same technology as ChatGPT.
Recently Google has announced ‘Bard’, a competitor for ChatGPT that uses Google’s own language model i.e. Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). The announcement comes only a few days after Google CEO Sundar Pichai detailed the company’s progress during an earnings call. Google said in a blog post that it is making Bard available to “trusted testers” ahead of making it broadly available to the public in the coming weeks.
Sam Altman calls Google a ‘lethargic search monopoly’
After Microsoft’s announcement, Sam Altman, in an interview with Ben Thompson in his newsletter Stratechery, called Google a ‘lethargic search monopoly’.
Sam was responding to a question about advertising on the new Bing.
“Is this going to be a subscription? Is it going to turn out that these models are not necessarily making search more profitable, they’re actually value-destructive, and that’s actually fine for you because you have 4 per cent share, and maybe not so fine for someone that may be more dominant in this space?” the interviewer asked.
To this, Sam Altman responded and said, “I think it’s fabulous for both of us. I think there’s so much upside for both of us here. We’re going to discover what these new models can do, but if I were sitting on a lethargic search monopoly and had to think about a world where there was going to be a real challenge to the way that monetization of this works and new ad units, and maybe even a temporary downward pressure, I would not feel great about that.”
In another interview, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that having healthy competition in the search market will not only mean more money for them but for publishers and advertisers as well. He further added that when it comes to the search engine market, Google is the ‘800 pound gorilla’ but with the innovation that Microsoft brings, they (Google) will definitely want to come out and ‘dance’.
