ChatGPT has the potential to destroy Google in a year or two at max, the creator of Gmail Paul Buccheit has opined. Buccheit thinks that ChatGPT will eliminate Google’s most money-making product, aka Search, and even if the global search engine giant were to –somehow— catch up on artificial intelligence, it won’t be able to deploy it fully without destroying the most valuable part of its business.
OpenAI’s Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer or ChatGPT as it’s more widely called, has been the talk of the town since launch in November 2022. It’s basically a prototype chatbot that uses AI to understand and then respond to text. The real kicker though is that it’s designed to converse naturally – a domain long considered to be a Google forte— and so far, the results have been amazing, surreal even, something that’s led to a meteoric surge in usage globally while giving OpenAI enough confidence to now—also— explore a paid version.
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Naturally, the chatbot’s rise and popularity have set alarm bells ringing in Mountain View with CEO Sundar Pichai apparently issuing “code red” and calling on Larry Page and Sergey Brin to help expedite AI projects at Google. The New York Times recently reported that Google plans to “demonstrate a version of its search engine with chatbot features this year” and is developing more than 20 AI products to seemingly counter ChatGPT. More details are expected to be revealed during the upcoming Google I/O 2023 developer conference.
“Google may be only a year or two away from total disruption. AI will eliminate the Search Engine Result Page, which is where they make most of their money,” Buccheit wrote on Twitter, adding that “even if they catch up on AI, they can’t fully deploy it without destroying the most valuable part of their business!”
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ChatGPT is based on GPT-3.5, a large language model that uses deep learning techniques (both supervised and reinforced) to theoretically give you detailed responses and articulate answers to queries across multiple domains. At its heart, it’s designed for human-like conversations/interactions but ChatGPT can do a lot more from writing and debugging complex computer programs to writing poetry. Its predecessor was capable of using text prompts only and generated its own text back but ChatGPT or GPT 3.5 is more engaging.
But it has its limitations too. OpenAI has publicly acknowledged that ChatGPT can sometimes write plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. It seems to have little knowledge of events that occurred post 2021 and is prone to misinformation and biases.
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