ChatGPT impact, new contenders & Google’s next moves
In a previous article I mentioned that during a Google meeting, the employees asked their execs on their thoughts on whether ChatGPT is a “missed opportunity” or a threat for the company. The latter initially appeared reassuring saying Google has similar capabilities but also a more “reputational risk” in providing wrong info. They thus stated that at the moment it would be best to move “more conservatively”. However, a week later Google appears worried & is already planning their next moves.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s former exec & ad team lead, recently stated that ChatGPT could in fact disrupt Google’s business model (i.e. the one that generated approx. $200 billion or 81% of Alphabet's overall revenue in 2021) whose primary goal is “to get you to click on links & ideally ads”. He also added that generative search systems like ChatGPT “are just a better experience,” & the fact that on 2019 he has also co-founded a subscription-based search engine with a generative search feature (i.e. Neeva) proves that he believes in their potential.
So you may ask, why doesn’t Google offer something similar or even better? For sure they have the skills and brains to do so but this would need lots of consideration as such a move comes with a risk of self-hurting their business model if it also ends up reducing the number of people going through search results & thus the number of clicks on ads.?
As if ChatGPT was not enough, there seem to be more & more contenders moving towards the same direction (e.g. You.com, Neeva, Perplexity.AI,?Quora Poe, etc.) allowing users among other things to:?
Most also do this within the search results page via super easy extensions (chrome-extension) for all to use.
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This simply signifies that Google’s dominance on search and advertising might soon find more challengers as Generative AI matures and RLHF evolves further.
At an age where there is an overwhelming plethora of information at one’s fingertips & yet the content & time to consume is also very important, it is to be expected that users will happily shift to the next AI augmented solution that promises instant, accurate, human consumable, user tailored information triggered by text queries or even voice searches.
What follows is part of an Axios article presenting how Meta & Google are continuously losing market share in Advertising.
This year is expected for them to bring less than half of all US digital advertising for the 1st time since 2014. Advertising is therefore becoming more competitive and Generative A.I. will play an important role for BigTech.
Talking about Google's next moves, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet has directed company resources to focus on addressing the threat of ChatGPT on their search engine business and to launch new AI prototypes. It thus remains to see how Google will choose to respond but one thing is certain. 2023 will be even more exciting as competition rises.