Is Google only afraid of ChatGPT this time?

Author | Yunzhao

Sundar Pichai, the head of Google, does not seem to be having a happy holiday.

Recently, according to an internal memo seen by the New York Times, Sundar adjusted ChatGPT to the highest level of "red alert" and "adjusted the work of many organizations within the company to deal with ChatGPT." "threats", and at the same time mobilize employees from other departments to deal with threats to the OpenAI program.

Additionally, Google will make a series of artificial intelligence announcements in May to address the growing dangers to the search giant’s business model. But these are just checking and filling gaps in functional products, and they are far from enough.

What is Google worried about? Just ChatGPT?

1. Google is afraid

1. User attention shifts, directly affecting revenue

Part of the reason why Google is so nervous may be advertising revenue. In contrast, chat The robot can output results with just one question and answer, while the search engine needs to browse and choose from tens of millions of terms and advertisements.

Google has dominated the search market for 20 years, and anything that threatens this lucrative business (which accounts for about 90% of Alphabet's profits) is something Sundar has good reason to worry about.

Sridhar Ramaswamy, the former head of Google’s advertising team, said that the use of ChatGPT prevented users from clicking on Google links with advertisements to a certain extent. Advertising will earn Google $208 billion in 2021, accounting for 81% of Alphabet’s total revenue.

Some industry experts believe that Google may focus on improving its search engine rather than removing it.

2. Get up early and go to market late, but have a sluggish attitude toward innovation

Picture: theregister

Google has encountered potential threats: ChatGPT, Google's core product - search, will be replaced by AI systems. Similar remarks existed some time ago, but they did not attract the attention of managers at the time.

Because as we all know, Google itself is an artificial intelligence giant.

This is the case with AlphaGo, which set off a boom in AI research. The launch of AlphaFold in November 2021 was even featured in Nature, which amazed the world. In AlphaCode in February this year, it defeated half of the programmers in the programming test. Even in terms of chatbots, its latest artificial intelligence system LaMDA was announced at the I/O conference in May. However, Google has not made public its conversational AI. The reasons given are that firstly, it is not accurate enough, and secondly, it can easily cause harm to users.

Of course, industry experts don’t think so. In their view, Google has been in a tangled state, ranking behind advertising revenue in its positioning and intensity of AI.

The value of the search algorithm itself lies in finding answers efficiently, but commercial greed will always make the algorithm dull and irrelevant.

If the problem is solved too quickly and too easily, as far as search engines are concerned, there will be no way to open up more positions for advertising. This is not just a problem for Google, but for all search engine businesses. problems faced by the company.

For those companies that have achieved extraordinary success in "defining the market", it is difficult to take completely different actions.

2. Users: Sundar is right to worry

From a user's perspective, compared to ChatGPT and StackOverflow, the Google search experience is the worst. The reason is obvious: users want answers when they search, not a middleman pushing a list of links.

The same is true for search. There is an example that can illustrate the different search experiences on ChatGPT, Google search, and Stack Overflow.

One developer once commented: With ChatGPT, I might be able to reduce my Google usage by half or more when researching stuff. Even though ChatGPT often gives incorrect results, the two are worlds apart.

For example, the developer can ask "Please find me a language library that can do XX. The requirement is to have a certain license." Then "Please tell me the advantages of X library over Y" can Summarize the advantages of each library. You can then go on to ask "Please implement something basic using the X library" which actually provides an example of how to use the library.

Although sometimes the examples are incorrect, you can visit the library's website and use the guidance already included in the examples to flip through the documentation.

This is much easier than having Google search results littered with spam links, often written by artificial intelligence that looks legitimate for SEO but is completely wrong.

Let me mention Stack Overflow again. After developers search for questions of interest, the first answer they get is often "Why do you want to do this? You should do this." As you can imagine, there is no You get the answer you want, but the people who upvoted the answer will feel great.

It can be seen that the charm of ChatGPT lies in the conversational search, which meets the needs of real problem solving, and is in line with people's habit of communicating and solving problems, and the experience is good.

When I search for something on Google, I don't want a list of links, I want an answer. Chat eliminates this intermediate step.

As for whether the answer given is accurate or not, it is also a concern of people. If this problem is solved, it will be worth millions of dollars or even more.

So far, a reviewer from a foreign media has found in testing that the answers obtained by ChatGPT are quite close to the accuracy of what he usually searches on Google - even if it is not 100% correct for the chat, It is also better than a random link list with algorithmic bias (the most criticized thing about search engines is that the homepage is full of ads).

Sundar is right to be very worried.

3. Advertising Xiao He ruined search

In the past 20 years, Google has grown from a start-up company full of innovative energy to a technology giant troubled by change.

The long-standing reliance on traffic advertising as a business model has now become a shackles for giants when facing changes.

As a commenter said: The relevance of giving answers is declining, just like Google's popularity.

For example: Search for the name of a movie and Google will give you Wikipedia and imdb.com, which will alternately be the first result, then the second.

For another example, when a drummer searches for who is the musician in an album, he used to get the inner page description of the problem, but now he only returns the song, album or 150 miles away. There is an audio store.

In another example, Google search still didn't manage to filter out sites that were coded as local businesses when the user didn't reveal their real address. This means that if a user is looking for a store that sells a certain item in their area, a result from a "service" company hundreds of miles away is returned.

For this, people often blame the SEO industry. 20 years ago, Google began to dominate the search market, but as the “SEO” industry swarmed in, it worked tirelessly to make Google results less useful.

The advantage of ChatGPT is that it has not yet caught the attention of SEO people. But maybe soon, if Google doesn't try to prevent the SEO industry from drawing attention to its new rival, ChatGPT will encounter the same problem.

4. Written at the end

Whether ChatGPT is a temporary hit, or can it become an application product that breaks AI from academia to the mainstream crowd? Judging from the current possibilities, it will develop into The potential of the latter is still strong enough. Of course, the shortcomings are also quite prominent, such as the integration of existing data and the lack of good introduction of new content, and the inability to withstand rigorous logical scrutiny, etc.

As for Google, it is obvious that it has seen various possibilities of this new opponent. However, over the years, from AlphaGo to AlphaFold and AlphaCode, Google’s innovation in artificial intelligence has been obvious to all. For the AIGC sector, it also released LaMDA, but out of concerns about the existing advertising model, it seems that the development prospects of this form are unclear. Not enough determination to push forward.

The arrival of ChatGPT allows us to see the "pragmatism" of search, which will accelerate the awareness of potential business dangers among those at the helm. Google at this time is not so much the regret of "getting up early and rushing to the late market", but it is better to say that it is a new beginning of "self-revolution" practice.

Although, whether Google’s core product search will be replaced by artificial intelligence systems that can give more accurate research results is a big if. But as Margaret O'Mara, a professor at the University of Washington, said: "No company is invincible; all companies are vulnerable."

Reference link: https://www.theregister.com/ 2022/12/25/in_brief_ai/

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