A new chatbot from OpenAI took the internet by storm this week, dashing off poems, screenplays and essay answers that were plastered as screenshots all over Twitter by the breathless technoratti. Though the underlying technology has been around for a few years, this was the first time OpenAI has brought its powerful language-generating system known as GPT3 to the masses, prompting a race by humans to give it the most inventive commands. (My favorite is, “Write a Biblical verse explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR.”) Beyond the gimmicky demos, some people are already finding practical uses for ChatGPT, including programmers who are using it to draft code or spot errors. But the system’s biggest utility could be a financial disaster for Google by supplying superior answers to the queries we currently put to the world’s most powerful search engine.
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Google works by crawling billions of web pages, indexing that content and then ranking it in order of the most relevant answers. It then spits out a list of links to click through. ChatGPT offers something more tantalizing for harried internet users: a single answer based on its own search and synthesis of that information. ChatGPT has been trained on millions of websites to glean not only the skill of holding a humanlike conversation, but information itself, so long as it was published on the internet before late 2021.
I went through my own Google search history over the past month and put 18 of my Google queries into ChatGPT, cataloguing the answers. I then went back and ran the queries through Google once more, to refresh my memory. The end result was, in my judgment, that ChapGPT’s answer was more useful than Google’s in 13 out of the 18 examples.
“Useful” is of course subjective. What do I mean by the term? In this case, answers that were clear and comprehensive. A query about whether condensed milk or evaporated milk was better for pumpkin pie during Thanksgiving sparked a detailed (if slightly verbose) answer from ChatGPT that explained how condensed milk would lead to a sweeter pie. (Naturally, that was superior.) Google mainly provided a list of links to recipes I’d have to click around, with no clear answer.
That underscores ChatGPT’s prime threat to Google down the line. It gives a single, immediate response that requires no further scanning of other websites. In Silicon Valley speak, that is a “frictionless” experience, something of a holy grail when online consumers overwhelmingly favor services that are quick and easy to use.
Google does have its own version of summarized answers to some queries, but they are compilations of the highest ranked web page and typically brief. It also has its own proprietary language model, called LaMDA, which is so good that one of the company’s engineers thought the system was sentient.
Read the full article here by Parmy Olson, Advisor Perspectives.
