ChatGPT AI threat brings Google co-founders back to action, report says

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s top AI chatbot, is such a serious threat to Google’s core business that the company’s co-founders have re-engaged with the search giant, The New York Times reported on Friday. .

Startup OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November, and within days more than a million people started hitting it with a wide range of questions and requests. The artificial intelligence system was trained on large amounts of text on the Internet and can answer questions, write essays, write computer programs and generate all kinds of information.

ChatGPT may seem authoritative, but that’s not always correct, and you can’t tell where it gets its answers from. It’s impressive enough to be a viral internet hit, though, and it’s worthy enough that Google declared a “code red” response to ChatGPT.

Now, at the request of Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google’s parent company Alphabet, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are looking into the matter, The Times reported. They had largely left day-to-day operational roles by 2019.

Google has a rival AI technology called PaLM, but it hasn’t made this AI system available to the public. And he’s an AI pioneer, inventing the “transformer” technology that’s at the heart of great language models like PaLM and OpenAI’s ChatGPT foundation, GPT-3. In a blog post this week, the company summarized several areas where Google uses AI, from suggesting email responses to serving ads.

Google has not commented on the co-founders’ moves or its position on ChatGPT. But spokeswoman Lily Lin said it was important for the company to ensure AI was used safely.

“We believe that AI is a fundamental and transformative technology that is incredibly useful for individuals, businesses and communities, and as our AI Principles underline, we must consider the broader societal impacts that these innovations can have,” Lin said. “We continue to test our AI technology internally to make sure it is useful and safe, and we look forward to sharing more experiences with the outside soon.”

Loup Ventures analyst Gene Munster sees ChatGPT, GPT-3 and major language models as a competitive threat to Google.

“One possible future is that these LLMs could be integrated into the backend of many technology services that we use,” Munster said in a Friday report. “It’s the result that could hurt Google in the long run.”

Ultimately, however, Google should be able to withstand the threat, he predicted. With four services that each have over a billion users and $60 billion in annual operating revenue from search, Google has “more than enough money to fund investments that will produce a ChatGPT competitor “.

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