DailyPost 2280
’CODE RED’
An undeclared, unseen war has just been declared. The battle for AI will have different winners in quite a few numbers of AI enabled pathbreaking products by the time first round of dust is settled. The hegemony of well-established players in different products may witness a near erosion. The future is not ours to see, what will be, will be. This would always remain the final truism. The present portends the change in the offing; the nature, dimension and impact may still be far from known. The release of large language model ChatGPT, dialogue based, seems to be turning the table. It is making waves already.
The number of users touched a million in five days of its release. YouTube is full of its use cases, from essay writing to programming and lot many in between. The deficiencies of this model have also been brought out in the public domain. The strength of a dialogue model and the one which creates the response based on the conversation near instantaneously, has been lauded the world over. The comparison with Google was but natural and stories comparing the two and related issues have come to the fore. Suffice to say this was not a red herring for Google.
Google seems to have finally acknowledged the challenge. It has been reported in the New York times that Google has issued a “code red” over the rise of AIbot ChatGPT. It has been reported that CEO Sundar Pichai has redirected some teams to focus on AI products. Google synonymised search for two decades now and have always remained way ahead of curve. For the first time a challenge seems to have appeared on the horizon, it might be miles away, it might or might not happen. Google might be able to upstage who knows, but the fact of the matter is that the issue is there and which can at its worst be existential.
Certainly, it has sparked concerns of the future of Google search engine. It has been created by a buzzy conversational-artificial intelligence based chatbot created by OpenAI. Google’s CEO participated in many strategy meetings refocus their efforts to address the threat posed by ChatGPT. Google’s research, trust and safety division have been asked to shift gears to develop and launch AI prototypes and products. Some have tasked with the building DALL-E type image creation tool. The debate rages whether ChatGPT has the potential to replace Google search engine and, in turn, hurt Google’s ad-revenue business model. For tech users globally, there cannot be a better time.
CHATGPT OR GOOGLE SEARCH, THE BATTLE FOR SEARCH HAS BEGUN!
Sanjay Sahay