Google certainly thinks so. The Times reported in late December that the swift rise of ChatGPT was a “code red” for them internally.
For more than 20 years, the Google search engine has served as the world’s primary gateway to the internet. But with a new kind of chat bot technology poised to reinvent or even replace traditional search engines, Google could face the first serious threat to its main search business. One Google executive described the efforts as make or break for Google’s future.
“Make or break” from an executive is about as existential as it gets. One could assume they’d be prepared for a battle like this given their Assistant has been the best consumer conversational product for years. At their 2021 Google I/O software conference they unveiled LaMDA, a general purpose conversational chatbot which demonstrated a clear improvement over Assistant.
About a year later, one of Google’s engineers—from their Responsible AI team, no less—went public with his opinion that LaMDA was sentient. He was fired about a month later. Fast forward another few months and ChatGPT explodes on the scene and Google hits the panic button I mentioned above.
Last month, rumors broke that Microsoft would be making a big investment in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT—$10B was thrown around. A couple weeks later, in late Jan, Microsoft publicly acknowledged the investment—their third in OpenAI—but didn’t confirm the amount. The most important piece of that announcement was this:
Microsoft will deploy OpenAI’s models across our consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology.
Just a few days before that announcement it was reported that Larry Page and Sergey Brin were called in to advise on strategy and a response to ChatGPT.
Mr. Page and Mr. Brin, who had not spent much time at Google since they left their daily roles with the company in 2019, reviewed Google’s artificial intelligence product strategy, according to two people with knowledge of the meetings who were not allowed to discuss them. They approved plans and pitched ideas to put more chatbot features into Google’s search engine. And they offered advice to company leaders, who have put A.I. front and center in their plans.
“Code red,” indeed. A couple weeks later, after their Q4 ’22 earnings call, Sundar Pichai mentioned that…
Users will soon be able to use language models “as a companion to search”
One day before Microsoft would detail their ChatGPT integrations with Bing and the Edge browser, Google unveiled their LaMDA-based search companion, Bard. The fanfare was dulled due to the demo including a factual error about the James Webb Space Telescope, which you can still find on their announcement blog post and in this tweet (it didn’t take the first pictures of an exoplanet). Naturally, the internet pointed this error out in every way it could. In the wake of the announcement, Alphabet’s stock fell ~7%. That reveal and blunder seemed to mute news that they invested a few hundred million in a ChatGPT competitor.
Alphabet’s Google has invested almost $400 million in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, which is testing a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to a person familiar with the deal.
It’s rare to see a company as large, powerful, and ubiquitous as Google in such a public position of weakness. Disruption tends to feel sudden in retrospect but it’s possible we’re watching it happen in real time. It’s hard for me to imagine Google Search not being a part of daily internet usage but it would be foolish for me to ignore that their position is being threatened in a way it hasn’t been in decades.