Google dominates the desktop search industry, currently holding 84% of the market share. This monopoly has existed for 7 years, with Google making the majority of its money through search ads (82% of its revenue). However, with the introduction of AI-powered search engines like chat GPT, the industry is undergoing a transformation.
Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin Ph.D. students at Stanford University in California. It offers a diverse range of services and products such as search (what’s best known for), advertising, cloud computing, software, and hardware.
Often when we are trying to find something on the internet or find something out we’re googling. This’s so common and already ingrained in us. But it’s search current form hasn’t changed much over the past 20 years.
Just few days the Microsoft CEO Satyla Nadella confirmed its $10 billion investment in Open AI. They want to embed this technology not just in Microsoft web search, but they want to embed it across all their tech products systems/infrastructure like Microsoft Azure and so Word and Excel and all others.
Having a tool on with you type any type of question and it gives you conversional answer seem a threat to current engine leader and make them look old. But there are certain risks with future connection with linking chat, to the internet to Bing. When you google something, when you search it you still need to go through bunch of websites and find it by your own. Use your brain and critical thinking to evaluate which information is the good one. While chat GPT gives you single answer that may not be accurate and you don’t really know where it’s coming from.
Also Microsoft is going to face to the fact that computing power to run chat GPT search vs google search has been estimated 7 times as much bigger. This race may end up costing both companies a lot of money.
How is google reacting to this explosion of interest of chat GPT and Open AI. For sure they are worried about it. Few days ago they has announced Code Red and returned Larry Page and Sergey Brin Google’s founders.
The company knew that AI is the future, therefore acquired DeepMind, a UK-based AI research lab, nearly nine years ago. Google also plans to launch a series of AI programs, including image creation and something that can build and correct code in app development. But apparently they didn’t know that this boom would happen so soon which surprised them. In order to not fall out of the game, already this year, they plan to unveil more than 20 new products and demonstrate a version of its search engine with chatbot features.
They have also been working on something comparable to chat GPT for a long time. The LamDA system’s conversation proved really realistic. The illusion has gotten so good that one employee working on it freaked out thought he was speaking to a conscious being. He wrote. “I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent.”
Emily M. Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington said “We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them” . So that they are still just models that mimic human speech. These large language models “learn” by being shown a lot of text and predicting what word will come next, or by being shown text with words missing and filling them in. It will take some time, in my opinion, for them to become conscious and take over the world, whatever that means.
China is also set to play a big role in the AI revolution, with its access to data from 1.4 billion people. The country is poised to challenge tech companies in America and Europe, and it will be interesting to see what developments it has in store for the future.
Will Google maintain its position, or it has become too bureaucratic and too large organisation to deal with new and fresh start-ups? “For Google it’s a real problem if they write a sentence with hate speech in it and it’s near the Google name,” – said Ramaswamy. And cannot afford shortcomings that could ruin its prestige. Google and Microsoft are held to a higher standard than a start-up that might argue that its service is simply a summary of content available on the internet. It’s both responsible and risky to release AI products so quickly. But he who does not take risks does not drink champagne and it seems to me that Microsoft is about to surpass the giant.
Resources and references:
- Global desktop market share of search engines 2015-2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/#:~:text=Global%20desktop%20market%20share%20of%20search%20engines%202015-2022&text=As%20of%20December%202022%2C%20online,share%20of%20around%2084.08%20percent.
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/
- Will OpenAI End Google’s Search Monopoly? (forbes.com)
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidphelan/2023/01/23/how-chatgpt-suddenly-became-googles-code-red-prompting-return-of-page-and-brin/?sh=192d83545977
- https://www.ft.com/content/f61d1e9d-caec-4a0e-a9bd-364c13dc2aa8
- https://www.ft.com/content/55a0498a-66e4-4a43-b733-fd832ec09d9b
