Panic everyone! Next week, Google will host what can only be described as an “urgent” event. According to the invitation sent to The Verge, the event will “use the power of AI to reimagine how people search, explore and interact with information, making what they need more natural and intuitive than ever before.” It revolves around ‘making people discoverable’. In other words, Google is about to fire up a copy machine and paste his ChatGPT from OpenAI onto the platen. Of course, this 40-minute event of his will be streamed live on YouTube on February 8th.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced its earnings yesterday, and Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai promised: Earlier this year, the company declared itself “Code Red” over the rapid rise of ChatGPT, helping co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin out of retirement.
Google has many AI technologies, but most are not publicly available. Equipped with chatbot language model “LaMDA” (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) and image generation AI “Imagen”. OpenAI has wowed the world by turning similar technology into public products like his DALL-E and ChatGPT and has drawn a lot of attention to the company, but Google keeps everything inside and doesn’t know about these projects. I’ve only talked about it in blog posts and research papers.
According to a CNBC report, one result of Google’s productization efforts is called “The Apprentice Bard,” which uses LaMDA technology to allow people to “ask questions and provide detailed answers similar to ChatGPT.” A chatbot that allows you to receive Google provides “alternative search pages that can use the question-and-answer format”, “prompts for potential questions placed just below the main search bar on the Google homepage”, and “bubbles just below the gray search bar”. , which gives a more human-like response than regular search results.”
It’s not even clear if ChatGPT is a real problem for Google. Google has a history of overreacting to other popular things on the internet, and these “competitor clone” projects litter Google Graveyard. At some point, we saw Facebook as an existential threat and built Google+. That project was eventually shut down, and Google is now out of the public eye, but the company still seems to be doing well. Before that, “Google’s biggest search rival” was Amazon. These concerns eventually led to the birth of Google Shopping Express, a clone of Amazon Prime. That project failed too, and somehow Amazon still replaced Google Search. ChatGPT is advertised as a search competitor as it is a way to get direct answers to your questions. It’s part of Google Search’s business, but Google already has an interface for getting direct answers: the Google Assistant. Like ChatGPT, Assistant was originally marketed as a chatbot.
The Assistant works fine for simple queries, but Google is reportedly unable to monetize the feature and is cutting resources from the department. It’s not clear how ChatGPT’s competitors will change the core issue of monetization beyond kicks. Monetization can be done by sorting through a list of 10 blue links, but getting people to find the answer quickly isn’t easy. Forcing more people into that style of interface could hurt Google’s bottom line. This is not just a Google issue. Even Amazon couldn’t find an answer to monetizing Alexa.
Perhaps the only part of Google that ChatGPT threatens is the stock price. The company’s announcement seems pretty hyped because Google hosts several annual events, like Google I/O every May, where the announcement can easily be incorporated. I can see it. However, that’s next quarter, and if Google is concerned about investor confidence, it could explain why it feels like this event needs to happen this quarter instead of next. Tune in on Wednesday!
