ChatGPT is an impressive technology and it has fascinated many people on the idea that it could become the new internet or even be the end of Google. Let's take a look at its technology to see if it's a real threat to the most popular search engine, since Google's DeepMind is already coming up with its own answer to ChatGPT.
Microsoft recently invested $10 billion in OpenAI, the company behind the acclaimed chatGPT, and is eager to implement the technology into its products. Before answering the question of whether OpenAI ChatGPT could be the end of Google as we know it, a few things need to be clarified.
Isn't it revolutionary to produce a chatbot that can answer questions from humans, and we already have AI technology built into numerous applications, so what made chatGPT so popular in such a short time?
It is one of the first AI technologies that is easy to understand and interact with for the general public. The difference from other chatbots is chatGPT's ability to interact in a language that is difficult to distinguish from a chat with a real human being. And it's trained on a much larger dataset with massive computing power, making it vastly superior to other chatbots. Offering this service to the general public, however, does not come without costs, which could also be one of the reasons why some of the previous chatbots have not been made available to the general public. The estimated cost of running chatGPT is around $100,000 per day, and that of each word generated on it is estimated at $0.0003.
Will it be the end of the Google search engine?
Will chatGPT be a replacement for Google or even the Internet, as the Microsoft CEO said on its Q4 2022 earnings conference call? chatGPT is a machine learning model trained to generate text on a given input, while Google is a search engine designed to find information on the internet through link relationships between websites. While Google is able to find information that has been recently published, the chatbot needs to be retrained on new data containing this information, which can be a computationally heavy process. Here is our interaction with the current version of chatGPT, clearly demonstrating the limitations in the input data:
It's a similar request using Google:
What Google does better than chatGPT:
Google provides search results based on real-time data;
Google returns multiple answers that are easy enough to navigate;
Google clearly indicates the source, although neither Google nor chatGPT has any content validation in the response;
Google is faster and cheaper.
Google's DeepMind accelerates to create response to chatGPT
DeepMind, which is a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google's parent company) that works on AI technology, and is one of the leading research groups within Artificial Intelligence. Most likely for Alphabet/Google it was very frustrating to be overtaken by OpenAI and consequently DeepMind was asked to allocate resources to create its own version. DeepMind recently announced an upcoming launch of its chatGPT competitor called Sparrow, which could be released for a “private beta” in 2023. Sparrow is expected to be more accurate, as well as having the ability to cite specific sources of information.
The OpenAI chatbot has indeed revolutionized many types of information queries and other types of activities, but it remains very doubtful whether it can be a replacement for Google, nor be a new phase of the Internet. The fact that the technology is unpatented and being replicated by DeepMind, and possibly even Baidu in China, indicates that OpenAI's chatbot, while impressive, has managed to solve the engineering issues behind the technology. But if other tech companies can make their own versions, the business value is less unique. In any case, Microsoft spent less than 1% on an option in AI technology.
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