The second search engine war - how ChatGPT will change the world

Three years ago, the world was changed by Covid. A year ago, it was the war in Ukraine. As we entered 2023, the world changed yet again, this time because of a… chatbot.

For those who have not heard of it yet, ChatGPT is the world’s first successful AI-driven chatbot.

When one googles a term, they get back a list of articles on the internet. While search engines have become a lot better at personalising and accurately pinpointing information over the past few years, their basic architecture has remained the same since the days of Yahoo! in the mid-nineties. ChatGPT is revolutionising the ‘answer’. No longer a list of things, the chatbot actually synthesizes original natural-language answers to real questions - even poorly phrased ones. Instead of looking through endless documents to figure out the percentage of fixed-rate mortgages in the US, now you can simply ask a question and be sure to get a direct answer.

The bot, launched last November, has gained over 100 million users, making it the fastest growing app in history. In February 2023, ChatGPT appeared in an estimated 50,000 articles.

Critics will say that the level of English and discussion is that of a high schooler. For the most part they are right. It presents information in a simplistic ‘first-it-was-the-dinosaurs’ fashion, which is why ChatGPT is initially heavily used by students to find a way around the usual copy-paste searches schools and university teachers run.

And yes, it makes mistakes.

It is though, still a big leap in technology. Until a few years ago, the world’s most successful chatbot had the intelligence of a four-year old. Microsoft’s experiment with Tay, a chatbot let loose on Twitter in 2016, was an epic disaster. The bot turned into an internet troll and espoused right-wing fundamentalism within the 24 hours of life before its termination. The leap in just six years is enormous.

To test it, I asked ChatGPT to synthesize an original 1,000 word story, based on a short story I once wrote (which is how I knew it was original). It came up with a decent story. Then I asked it to rewrite the story both in an Edgar Allan Poe manner and then as Shakespeare sonnet.

"Eternal Remembrance: A Sonnet for the Departed"

[Written by ChatGPT]

ChatGPT can write original viral social media posts, essays, books and virtually any content in a matter of minutes. It can also write code. And don’t think that the Bot doesn’t have an opinion. Asked whether I should vote Republican or Democrat it presented me with a balanced argument. When I identified myself as a liberal, the opinion remained balanced but leaned Democrat as the more likely choice. A decision-making model is the ultimate goal of most AIs out there, so current technology should very easily come up with an eloquent way for the model to convince me to vote for one party.

It is eloquence which brings us to the next issue, ‘Anthropomorphism’. Anthropomorphism is the interpretation of nonhuman things in terms of human characteristics. It is a natural instinct, and the reason why we see a ‘face’ on the surface of Mars instead of random formation. Or the reason why we prefer puppies over geckos, and geckos over spiders as pets (well, most people do anyway). The fact that the language is ‘normal’ is what makes it so attractive. We like talking to something humanesque. The Anglosaxon culture especially gives great importance to eloquence, as a sign of intelligence. It is on this principle that many search engines are built, to identify original content.

Anthropomorphism drives technology. Alexa and Siri are alogorithms with human names pretending to be helpers with human voices. In science fiction, the ultimate goal is an anthropomorphic robot. Today’s scientists grew up with Isaac Asimov’s ‘I Robot’ and Ridley Scott’s ‘Blade Runner’, featuring near-human robots. And while trash-can looking Star Wars’ R2-D2 may be lovable, it was 2013’s ‘Her’, where Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with the human voice of an AI that earned the Oscar.

In just two months, ChatGPT is changing the landscape for the tech industry. Currently, the search engine world is dominated by Google, with a whopping 93% market share.

Google and Microsoft (Bing) have already announced that they are entering the AI race, as they see the industry-changing disruption wrought by the chatbot. Google, one of the biggest companies in the world, made $162 billion last year from search engine services alone (which account for 60% of its revenue). This implies a search engine industry size of nearly $175 bn.

However, the implications are much bigger, as Google represents the main advertising channel of our times. A doctor advertising on Google may pay $200 per month for targeted adverts and make thousands more on the back of that.

Sundar Pijay, Google’s CEO, was excited that the search engine industry will get a much-needed revamp and introduced us to Google’s chat AI, Bard. Investors may have been disappointed by Bard’s response, as the AI made an error, and plunged Alphabet’s stock 10% a few weeks ago, but we are still at early development stages. Humans make mistakes. So do search engines, AIs and Google Maps. Microsoft follows, saying it will add an AI chatbot feature to Bing and incorporate more AI in the myriads of services it sells.  If Google changes the model, or if Microsoft comes up with a better engine, it will have a domino effect on millions of enterprises -and marketing departments.

ChatGPT is already changing the world. It’s threatening to reshuffle the search engine market, and with it change firms globally. It can also:

• Create original marketing content
• Compile research
• Brainstorm ideas
• Write code
• Automate (more) parts of the sales process
• Deliver aftercare services
• Provide customised instructions
• Streamline processes
• Translate (still a bit behind this one)

To understand how much and how fast, we need but to travel to 1990, and remember how different a world before search engines was. This is what life before ChatGPT may look to us a few years from now.

The implications of a machine that can write good content, and keeps learning, are momentous. The financial world experimented with Robo-advisers, but the experiment failed, as people would rather interact with humans. Will a human-like AI succeed where dull robots failed? Possibly so.

As humans compete, they will have to come up with increasingly original content and ideas. This will eliminate a lot of wasteful content and pre-packaged advice.

However, a Chatbot has some ways to go before being able to provide good advice. A bot will take the input you give it and turn it directly into output. “I want to retire in 10 years”, will say the client, and the Robot will give them an algorithm of how that may happen. But it won’t navigate them with a plan. It can write content, but can’t come up with a marketing plan. It can analyse, but can’t quite synthesize. It can answer, but it can’t ask.

But, as we said, we are still in the early stages of a potential revolution. Corporations should immediately hire people who can “speak” ChatGPT and have them work closely with marketing and other areas of business strategy.

In the early 2000s, the moto was that “all companies will be online, or they won’t be companies”. ChatGPT is one of those inventions that can create its own rule: In a couple of year’s time, companies that haven’t fully embraced and understood the workings of generative AI, may be not be companies at all…

[#writtenbyahuman]

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