Chatbots are here and the internet industry is in turmoil

Sridhar Ramaswamy, who led Google’s advertising division from 2013 to 2018, said Microsoft and Google recognized that their current search business might not survive. “The wall of advertisements and the sea of ​​blue links are a thing of the past,” said Mr Ramaswamy, who now runs Neeva, a subscription search engine.

Amazon, which has a bigger share of the cloud market than Microsoft and Google combined, hasn’t been as public about its chatbot quest as the other two, despite having been working on AI technology for years. .

But in January, Andy Jassy, ​​CEO of Amazon, corresponded with Mr. Delangue of Hugging Face, and a few weeks later, Amazon expanded a partnership to make it easier to offer Hugging Face’s software to customers.

As this underlying technology, known as generative AI, becomes more widely available, it could fuel new ideas in e-commerce.. Late last year, Manish Chandra, the managing director of Poshmark, a popular online thrift store, found himself daydreaming during a long flight from India about chatbots profiling the tastes of people, then recommending and buying clothes or electronics. He imagined grocers instantly filling orders for a recipe.

“It becomes your mini-Amazon,” said Chandra, who has made integrating generative AI into Poshmark one of the company’s top priorities over the next three years. “This layer is going to be very powerful and disruptive and almost start a new retail layer.”

But generative AI causes other headaches. In early December, users of Stack Overflow, a popular social network for computer programmers, began posting substandard coding tips written by ChatGPT. Moderators quickly banned the AI-generated text.

Part of the problem was that people could post such questionable content much faster than they could write themselves, said Dennis Soemers, a moderator on the site. “ChatGPT-generated content looks trustworthy and professional, but often isn’t,” he said.