Paul Buchheit, known as the architect of Gmail, is worried that artificial intelligence will cause problems for Google. Buchheit says that the new chatbot ChatGPT will completely disrupt Google’s business in a year or two, and the search engine results page will disappear in the process.
By now you’ve probably come across a number of ChatGPT works: ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbot that can do everything from rewriting the song “Baby Got Back” in the Canterbury Tales style to simulating its own chatbot inside a chatbot, apparently. will be a problem for Google in the future.
Open AI chatbot prompt: "Rewrite Baby Got Back in the Style of the Canterbury Tales."
Once upon a time in the land of Canterbury
A lady fair with a behind so hearty
Walked in the room with a waist so small
And a round thing in front of us all
… pic.twitter.com/D8Yqi7LbQp— Jonathan Stray (@jonathanstray) December 1, 2022
ChatGPT, which was made public last week, is doing surprisingly well. So much so that it’s good enough to convince a history and technology professor.
This caught the attention of Paul Buchheit, the engineer behind Gmail and Google. What impresses Buchheit is the quality of responses to questions posed to ChatGPT, compared to the results you get for the same query on Google.
It’s happened. I was doing my seminar today on Turing’s ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’. I asked the student to respond to one of Turing’s objections. The student put the question to #chatGPT and gave it as his own. It was a perfectly good answer.
— Jon Agar (@jon_agar) December 6, 2022
The chatbot owes its impressive natural language processing success to a method called “reinforcement learning from human feedback”. So much so, ChatGPT puts it this way: “Reinforcement learning from human feedback is a type of machine learning that involves training a model by providing feedback from the human user. This feedback is a score or a binary ‘true’ or ‘false’ It can take many forms, such as the ‘ tag.”
So, how can this situation disrupt the search giant Google? In addition to providing more detailed results from Google and getting answers more naturally, the problem for Google is that it can eliminate the need for a monetized search results page.
When you type a query into Google, you come up with thousands of natural results as well as ads that companies pay to be associated with certain keywords. Buchheit believes OpenAI’s chatbot could completely obliterate the search results page, and with it a huge source of revenue for Google.
Google may be only a year or two away from total disruption. AI will eliminate the Search Engine Result Page, which is where they make most of their money.
Even if they catch up on AI, they can't fully deploy it without destroying the most valuable part of their business! https://t.co/jtq25LXdkj
— Paul Buchheit (@paultoo) December 1, 2022
Buchheit writes on Twitter: “The way I imagine this to happen is the location of the browser’s URL/Search bar, automatically completing my thought/question while I’m typing, and also the best answer (it could be a link to a website or product) The old search engine backend will be used by the AI to gather relevant information and links which will then be summarized for the user. It’s like asking a professional human researcher to do the work, but the AI will take minutes for a human It will do the job instantly.”
The old search engine backend will be used by the AI to gather relevant information and links, which will then be summarized for the user. It's like asking a professional human researcher to do the work, except the AI will instantly do what would take many minutes for a human
— Paul Buchheit (@paultoo) December 1, 2022
It seems Buchheit may be right in his thinking. Since a question to be asked to artificial intelligence will answer the question instantly and accurately, result pages may disappear and a significant part of Google’s income may be destroyed by this robot. So, is this a good thing or a bad thing to happen?
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