is ChatGPT a Google killer?
The artificial intelligence community has made huge progress recently with the announcement of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence that can answer almost any question. And one of the biggest beliefs out there is that this could potentially disrupt Google. Is it possible that the final days of Google are now upon us?
ChatGPT is an amazing advancement in the artificially intelligent community. For those who may not know what this is, as the name implies, it’s a chatbot. But the difference is that it can answer almost any question. For instance, it can write a poem if you ask it to. Or it can write programming code by basically instructing the bot what you’d like to happen. It’s both amazing and terrifying at times. Needless to say, it will have far-reaching consequences for a variety of industries, ecosystems, and, most likely, our daily lives.
One of the biggest implications of this technology could be that we no longer need to “Google” things. We can simply ask this bot to give us the answer we’re looking for. Go ahead and give it a try. Ask something you’ve asked Google before. You’ll most likely be amazed by the results. And the next thing that comes to your mind is most likely: why do I need Google anymore if I can get the answer right here? Or my favorite comment: “This will be a Google killer.”
It takes more than a chatbot to kill Google.
Getting rid of Google is going to be very tough. While most of us think of Google as a search engine, it is actually the lifeblood of several mega industries. So if a chatbot is to replace Google, it somehow has to figure out how to be the same lifeline.
Take a simple e-commerce website that sells pizza ovens (I bought one and I love it) as an example. The e-commerce site will write an article explaining how a pizza oven can change someone’s life. Google will pick this up and remember the content. This article will be presented to me the next time I search for a pizza oven. I will read the article, and if I like what I hear, I will purchase the oven. Both the seller and I benefited.
Imagine if I were to ask ChatGPT about the pizza oven:
Google is a multi-sided market, ChatGPT is not
What most people don’t realize is that Google is a multi-sided market. Just as the example above demonstrated, two sides of the market got what they needed. If someone were to ask the same pizza question of the ChatBot, which was trained on the same content that Google discovered, the response could be this amazing explanation of what the oven does. However, it will not reveal where it obtained the answer (at least not yet). What’s the implication of that? One side of the market will benefit, and the other side will simply go away.
So unless ChatBot somehow makes sure both the user and the pizza oven ecommerce site can benefit from the answer, multiple mega industries that have benefited from Google search results will simply cease to exist and will certainly stop allowing the Chatbot creators to use their content to train the chatbot. And guess what happens next? Well, the chatbot will simply stop giving us the right answers.
I think the conclusion is simple: ChatGPT is amazing, but technology never went anywhere if it did not have the right monetization strategy, and as of now, I cannot see a strategy that will threaten Google. At least not yet.
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