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Welcome to the AI race!
Microsoft responded swiftly to Google, saying it would incorporate the ChatGPT chatbot into its search engine, Bing.
ChatGPT has already been added to Microsoft’s Teams software. You can expect it to turn up soon in Word, where it will write paragraphs for you. In Outlook it will compose entire emails, and in PowerPoint it will help you prepare slides for your next talk.
Chinese web giant Baidu has also sprung into action. It recently announced its latest chatbot would be released in March. Baidu’s chatbot is will be trained on 50 per cent more parameters than ChatGPT, and will be bilingual. Its share price jumped 15 per cent in response.
AI-driven search
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Google, along with the other tech giants, has been using AI in search for many years already. The difference now is that instead of searching based on the words you type, these new search engines will try to ‘understand’ questions. And instead of sending links, they’ll try to answer the questions, too.
But new chatbot technology is far from perfect. ChatGPT sometimes just makes stuff up. Chatbots can also be tricked into saying things that are inappropriate, offensive or illegal – although researchers are working hard to reduce this.
Existential risk
For Google, this has been described by the New York Times not just as an AI race, but a race to survive.
Advertising revenue from Google Search results contributes about three-quarters of the $283 billion annual revenue of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. If people start using AI chatbots to answer their questions rather than Google Search, what will happen to that income? Even if Google users stick with Google, but get their answers directly from the Bard, how will Google make money when no links are being clicked anymore? Microsoft may see this as an opportunity for its search engine, Bing, to overtake Google.
Will the AI race lead to cutting corners? There are a host of risks associated with big tech’s rush to cement the future of AI search.
For one, if tech companies won’t make as much money from selling links, what new income streams will they create?
A new interface
Perhaps the biggest impact from AI-driven search tools will be on how we interact with the myriad ever-smarter devices in our lives. We will stop pointing, clicking and touching, and will instead start having entire conversations with our devices.
(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
