Fresh off this fall’s wide release of DALL-E, the brilliant A.I.-powered text-to-image generator, the team at OpenAI has done it again.
Six days ago, the A.I. research outfit unveiled ChatGPT, arguably the most advanced, user-friendly chatbot to enter the public domain. As more than 1 million users have already discovered, ChatGPT provides remarkably intelligent, detailed, and conversational text in response to complex user prompts.
ChatGPT can write lines of code, pen a college-level essay, author responses in the voice of a pirate, and write a piano piece in Mozart’s style. For more examples of its astounding capabilities, simply search “ChatGPT” on Twitter and prepare to be awed.
“There’s a certain feeling that happens when a new technology adjusts your thinking about computing,” Box CEO Aaron Levie tweeted Sunday. “Google did it. Firefox did it. AWS did it. iPhone did it. OpenAI is doing it with ChatGPT.”
Already, the appetite for ChatGPT has been so great that OpenAI halted new sign-ups. A prompt on the site Monday morning read: “We're experiencing exceptionally high demand. Please hang tight as we work on scaling our systems.”
ChatGPT is free to use and doesn’t show ads, though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted Monday that “we will have to monetize it somehow at some point” due to “eye-watering” operating costs. (OpenAI launched in 2015 with $1 billion in funding from Silicon Valley luminaries, including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and received another $1 billion from Microsoft in 2019.)
While ChatGPT remains in the innocent incubation phase, its arrival foreshadows what could become one of the great disruptive events in modern tech.
As some industry insiders and media members have pointed out, ChatGPT performs many of the functions of Google—and often does them better than the Alphabet unit. Whereas Google merely empowers you with the links and tools needed to research information, ChatGPT can answer elaborate questions, solve intricate problems, and converse in a human-like manner.
Just how much of a threat could technology like ChatGPT pose to Google? Considering Alphabet earned $149 billion in revenue last year from Google Search and other web-based Google properties, the implications are enormous.
“The potential for something like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to eventually supplant a search engine like Google isn’t a new idea, but this delivery of OpenAI’s underlying technology is the closest approximation yet to how that would actually work in a fully fleshed out system, and it should have Google scared,” TechCrunch U.S. managing editor Darrell Etherington wrote Friday.
For now, the idea of upstart A.I. firms supplanting Google feels premature.
ChatGPT and lesser chatbots still churn out incorrect, incoherent, biased, or dangerously misguided answers on occasion, undercutting confidence in the product. (OpenAI willingly acknowledges these issues, calling them a necessary but unfortunate cost of development.) Google, by contrast, largely avoids such pitfalls by putting the onus on users to sift through information and draw their own conclusion.
“Search satisfaction is a reputation business,” Delip Rao, an A.I. researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, tweeted Saturday. “Once folks are let down by a search result on something critical, they will use less and less of that search interface. For example, Twitter search on https://twitter.com/ sucks, so I use other options to lookup (sic) my own tweets.” (He’s right. Twitter’s search function is awful.)
In addition, Alphabet still has plenty of time and money to beat back any aspiring Google rivals.
Alphabet and its A.I. subsidiary, DeepMind, are heavily invested in the large language models that underpin chatbots, as MIT Technology Review explored in September. And while OpenAI benefits from that massive buzz that comes with unveiling an early prototype, Alphabet has little to gain from rushing out early, unmonetized projects that could damage trust in the company or cannibalize existing revenue.
Even ChatGPT is skeptical of its ability to overtake Google. When the Independent asked ChatGPT whether it could replace Google, the bot replied, in part: “It is unlikely that a single search engine, such as ChatGPT, could completely replace Google.”
ChatGPT did, however, accurately note that advanced language models offer unique features and a different user experience when compared to Google. As the chatbot concluded: “Overall, ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionise the way we search for information online.”
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Jacob Carpenter
