So Google management has finally declared a code red over ChatGPT. As a Google Executive says “AI chatbots like ChatGPT could upend the search giant's business, which relies heavily on ads and e-commerce found in Google Search.”
And he’s right. If people can get used to asking a LLM model like ChatGPT for the immediate answer instantly without having to search through hundreds of overoptimized SEO websites festooned with unskippable ads, and a thousand pop ups, then why would they use Google anymore? They wouldn’t, is the answer. After all, when we use Google, we mostly want a question answered and ChatGPT answers questions better. Once OpenAI figures out a way to safely integrate WebGPT to have ChatGPT use the internet as a source for its answers, and have ChatGPT be able to provide sources for its answers, then it’ll be existentially damaging to Google.
And the worst part is that, if you believe Google’s researchers, they’ve had as good a LLM as ChatGPT for a while yet, but they just didn’t release it. In the annals of companies, it is not unknown - in fact it is very known - that the foremost company of a previous technology adopts a revolutionary new one. Rather they stick to what has worked until it works no more and they go under. Where is the Nokia smartphone? Microsoft does not dominate the mobile space even though they had complete dominance of the desktop computing space.
Unfortunately, I think that that’s what will happen to Google. As an article in the Atlantic points out, Google search has declined in usefulness, becoming bedecked in ads, and full of relentlessly SEO’d websites making looking what you’re looking to find, or finding a human voice, ever harder and harder. It’s not a coincidence that the amount of searches with the suffix “reddit” has risen dramatically in the last few years. Google Search is now so corporatized that it’s just not that useful anymore.
Thus, as ChatGPT was released first, and has supplanted a lot of what Google did for me in the daily search space, I foresee a future where Google declines and declines in relevance. Maybe not entirely collapse, but degraded to an IBM, a company that primarily caters to businesses, and search itself will become a much smaller part of the internet than it is now. It could very well end up as another company relegated to a busicness school case for innovation lag, as another Blockbuster who failed to adapt to the rise of AI. It could very well be that in 2084, no one will have heard of Google, while OpenAI would be the company with a 100 000 employees and a massive campus in Sillicon Valley.