If you want to find a good moving company today, you might turn to your favorite search engine (like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo) for advice.
Half a page into the ad, you’ll see a bunch of links to articles about the moving company. Click on one of the links and at the end you will be shown how to choose the appropriate ‘UN’. But it doesn’t last very long.
In a major announcement this week, Google announced plans to add its latest AI chatbot, LaMDA, to the Google search engine. This chatbot is called “Bard”.
I hope William Shakespeare’s descendants file a lawsuit. It’s probably not the job of the greatest English writer to answer the mundane question about how to find a good moving company. But he would.
Ask Bard how he does it, and he’ll quickly give you a logical 8-step plan. It starts with reading reviews and getting citations and ends with picking up references.
No more wading through pages of links. The answer is obvious. If you want to add even more Shakespearean insult, you can also ask the bard to respond in the form of a sonnet.
Welcome to AI racing!
Microsoft was quick to respond to Google, announcing that it would incorporate a ChatGPT chatbot into its Bing search engine.
Microsoft just recently announced that it will invest $10 billion in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in 2022, on top of its previous investment of more than $1 billion.
ChatGPT has already been added to Microsoft’s Teams software. It will immediately appear in Word and help you create paragraphs. Outlook can help you compose an entire email, while PowerPoint can help you prepare slides for your next talk.
Not to be outdone, Chinese web giant Baidu has also taken action. The company recently announced that it will release its latest chatbot in March. Baidu’s chatbot is trained with 50% more parameters than ChatGPT and becomes bilingual. As a result, the company’s stock price rose 15%.
AI-powered search
Google, like other tech giants, has already been leveraging AI in search for years. For example, AI algorithms order the search results that Google returns.
The difference now is that these new search engines try to “understand” your question rather than searching based on the words you type. And instead of sending the link, I will also try to answer the question.
However, new chatbot technology is far from perfect. ChatGPT just makes things up sometimes. Chatbots can also be tricked into saying inappropriate, offensive, or illegal things, but researchers are working hard to reduce this.
existential risk
For Google, the New York Times says, this isn’t just a race for AI, it’s a race for survival.
When ChatGPT first debuted late last year, alarm bells rang for the search giant. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin returned from outside work to oversee the response.
Advertising revenue from Google search results accounts for about three-quarters of Google’s parent company Alphabet’s $283 billion in annual revenue.
What will happen to that revenue if people start using AI chatbots instead of Google searches to answer their questions?
Even if Google users stick with Google and get their answers directly from Bard, how does Google make money if links are no longer clicked?
Microsoft may see this as an opportunity for its search engine Bing to overtake Google. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible. In his 1990s, before Google, I was very happy with AltaVista, the best search engine at the time. But as soon as it offered a better search experience, I quickly switched.
Will AI competition lead to cutting corners?
Google had previously kept the LaMDA chatbot from publicly available due to concerns that it could be misused or misunderstood. In fact, LaMDA famously fired one of his engineers, Blake LeMoyne, for claiming to be sentient.
There are many risks associated with big tech companies rushing to solidify the future of AI search.
First, if tech companies don’t make as much money selling links, what new revenue streams will they generate? Maybe they try to sell the information they collect from interactions with search chatbots? Or?
And what about the people who use these chatbots for basic purposes? These are personalized persuasive tools used to fool unsuspecting users or flood social media with conspiracy theories? It may be perfect for writing a certain message.
Needless to say, we’ve already seen ChatGPT successfully answer most homework questions. So far, public schools in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, Western Australia and Tasmania have banned its use to prevent cheating, but have banned access to Google and Bing. It seems unlikely that it can (or should be) prohibited.
Read more: Scams, deepfake porn, and romance bots: Advanced AI is exciting but extremely dangerous in the hands of criminals
new interface
When Apple released the Macintosh, it was the beginning of a revolution. Instead of typing out arcane instructions, just point and click on the screen. This revolution continued with the launch of Apple’s iPhone. iPhone is a palm-sized interface for computers and the Web.
Perhaps the biggest impact of AI-driven search tools will be on how we interact with the myriad of increasingly smarter devices in our lives. We will stop pointing, clicking, and touching, and instead use our devices to initiate conversations entirely.
We can only speculate about what this means in the long term. However, for better or worse, the way we interact with computers is about to change.
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