Will Google Search Be Disrupted By Chat GPT?


Over the last few months, there hasn’t been a single day where my mind has not been blown by the progress in AI and new tools that are coming out.

The flip side is that it just…. becomes mentally exhausting after a point.

This headline image seems very valid now- it is from a Tim Urban essay way back in 2015. We might already be at the point where the tiny human is shown standing, which is why it seems like the rate of change has gone up SO much.

One of the fundamental things that is going to change is how we interface with the virtual world and the internet, and I wanted to talk a little bit about that in this post.

So, today, I’ll cover:

  1. Open AI’s GPT-4 .
  2. Threat of disruption that Google’s search business is facing.
  3. A prediction on what the next search engine will look like.

All About GPT-4

Firstly, as you may have heard unless you’re living under a rock, Open AI released GPT-4, the successor to GPT-3. It is vastly more powerful (but can’t say how powerful, because they haven’t released the parameters). It can do things like:

  1. Generate images from text
  2. Analyse images (eg- it can analyse photos you upload, describe them, and then even improve upon them based on your prompts)
  3. Generate more robust code- many people on my feed have tweeted about building simple games like pong or snake completely by asking Chat GPT to write the code.

Overall, those that have used it so far say that it seems way smarter than GPT-3 and understands your prompts much much better.

How much smarter you ask?

It’s…getting a little bit scary to be honest.

Case in point:

This guy conspired with GPT-4 on ‘ways to help it escape from the boundaries set by it’s masters’. (see the image below).

Honestly, I’ve been reading about AI since the past 5 years and more frequently since I started this newsletter.

No one would have thought we would make so much progress in AI by 2023.

AI becoming sentient seems like something that might happen in the near-mid future rather than far.

On that happy note, let’s talk about the headline question:

Will Google Search be disrupted by Chat GPT?

Here’s my take:

Google search will not be disrupted by Chat GPT until it becomes accurate and stops spouting false information. The timeline for that is at least a few years, which is why Chat GPT is likely to remain a complementary tool to use along with Google Search, and not a replacement.

This is a very tough time to be Google, though. It’s facing a threat from so many quarters:

#1 Bing. Microsoft + Open AI’s collaboration has made Bing somewhat relevant once again- which seems so strange considering none of us had ever used it ever in our lives.

#2 Declining User Base. Younger people prefer to search forums like reddit, or even go on tiktok to find answers for their queries. Multiple reasons for this- from a general distrust on ‘SEO’ driven articles that rank on Google to lowered attention spans that want the answer quickly rather than having to read multiple long articles.

#3 Organizational Inertia. I wrote about this earlier as well. The entrepreneurs that made Google great are gone. What’s left is a HUGE company with engineers and managers at the top. No one with vision is there to steer the ship. They recently launched their Bard model (GPT competitor) which hardly generated buzz. They later announced AI integrations across GSuite- and still no one cared. Open AI is currently beating them hollow- at least in the perception game.

What Will Be The Next Search Engine?

My prediction is that in the next 10-15 years, there won’t be a search interface as it exists today.

Rather, each computer will have an AI agent which will fetch information off the internet for us.

If you’ve seen Iron Man, kinda like that. Imagine having a JARVIS embedded in your phone, wearable devices and computers.

We will trust these agents to scout information off the internet and provide us with the correct summation. They would even be able to generate visual interfaces for us with the aid of Generative AI. At that point, the ‘internet’ might simply be bits of information floating around and the ‘visual interface’ is something that will be customized by the AI agent for each individual.

In short- the internet of the future will be designed so that machines can interface with each other. They will relay the information to us much faster, much better and in a way more stimulating fashion than what we expect today.

Seems freaky?

To me too.

Anyway-that’s all for this week.

See you soon,

Shubhankar

PS: Next week, I’m thinking of writing about

  • The future of work with AI
  • What happens to us when AI nears human level intelligence

Would love to know from you which one (or any other topic really) you are more excited to read about!

Shubhankar Chaudhary

I used to operate a Defence Startup. In my free time, I like to write about personal growth, entrepreneurship and my journey on both these fronts.

Recent Posts