Everyone panic! Google is hosting an event next week that can only be described as “emergency.”According to an invitation sent by The Verge, the event will revolve around “using the power of AI to reimagine how people search, explore and interact with information, making finding what you want more natural and intuitive than ever before.”In other words, Google is going to fire up its photocopier and attach ChatGPT OpenAI to the roll. The 40-minute event will, of course, be streamed on YouTube on February 8th.
Google parent company Alphabet released its earnings call yesterday, and Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai promised that “very soon, people will be able to interact directly with our latest, most powerful language models as a complement to Search in experimental and innovative ways. Earlier this year, the company went on a code red for ChatGPT’s meteoric rise and even pulled co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin out of retirement to help out.
Google has a lot of AI technology, but it’s mostly closed to the public. It has a chatbot language model called “LaMDA”(Language Model for Conversational Applications) and an AI for creating images called “Imagen”. While OpenAI turns similar technologies into public domain products like DALL-E and ChatGPT that amaze the world and get a lot of attention for the company, Google keeps everything inside and only ever talks about these projects in blog posts and research papers..
One result of Google’s efforts to build the product, according to a CNBC report, is called “Apprentice Bard,”a chatbot that uses LaMDA technology to allow people to “ask questions and get detailed answers similar to ChatGPT.”The report outlines many possible directions. Google is experimenting with, for example, an “alternative search page that can use the Q&A format”, “suggestions for potential questions placed directly below the main search bar”on the Google homepage, and a results page that shows a “grey pop-up window directly below search string that offers more human answers than regular search results.”
It’s not even clear that ChatGPT is a real problem for Google. Google has a history of overreacting to other popular things on the internet, and these “competitor clone”projects are littering the Google graveyard. At some point, the company considered Facebook an existential threat and created Google+. Eventually that project was shut down and Google has no social media presence today, but the company still looks okay. Prior to this, it was Amazon that was “Google’s biggest search competitor”. These fears eventually spawned the Amazon Prime clone Google Shopping Express. This project also failed., and somehow Amazon hasn’t replaced Google search yet. ChatGPT is promoted as a search competitor because it is a way to get direct answers to questions. While this is part of the Google Search business, Google already has an interface for direct responses: Google Assistant. Like ChatGPT, Assistant was originally conceived as a chatbot.
While Assistant works great for simple requests, Google has been unable to monetize the feature and has reportedly cut the division’s resources. It’s not clear how ChatGPT’s competitor will change the underlying monetization issue, other than drop that issue in a few years. Monetization works when you have a list of 10 blue links to sort through, but it’s not that easy when you help people find the answer right away. Pushing more people towards this interface style could hurt Google’s bottom line. It’s not just Google: Amazon hasn’t been able to find the answer to monetizing Alexa either.
Perhaps the only part of Google threatened by ChatGPT is the stock price. Google seems pretty crazy about its announcement because the company has several annual events that this announcement could easily fit into, such as the Google I/O that takes place every May. However, this is the next quarter, and if Google is worried about investor confidence, that explains why it seems like this event should happen this quarter and not next quarter. Tune in Wednesday!