Artificial intelligence is taking the world by a storm and some of the recent innovations, such as Chat GPT, having been blowing away peoples minds. However, a debatable question that is also arising is whether Chat GPT can serve as an alternative to the popular Google Search or other search engines because of its nature where it tries to answer every question or query you throw at it. Today, we are going to try to answer that question. But first of all, let’s get you through the basics.
What is Chat GPT?
ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. OpenAI trained the model to have a conversation with the user on the other end. “The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests”, explained OpenAI.
While Chat GPT is still free to use, people have recently spotted a new paid professional plan for $42 a month which would give you additional advantages over the free users. What’s impressive here is how human-like Chat GPT’s responses are and users have been taking full advantage of it, be it for their personal or professional uses.
Why is Google worried?
As per a recent report from The New York Times, Google is quite worried about Chat GPT’s existence because it could, in turn, pose a threat to Google’s search business. Ironically, Google’s Search engine ate up other small players since its inception because others couldn’t keep up with what Google was doing.
Experts believe that Google not only has Chat GPT to worry about but also other organisations who are working on similar models. This is because these AI chatbots make us think as to why one should use Google Search when one can straight up ask questions to AI who can give a more exact response to the query with an added advantage of a human touch.
A Google executive who spoke to the New York Times said that AI chatbots such as ChatGPT could upset the search business, thereby affecting its ads business, which earns Google most of its money.
Does Google have a counter plan?
An organisation as big as Google doesn’t lack resources by any means and can put them to good use whenever they feel their existence is being threatened. And so, Google knew where the world is moving and it already showcased its chatbot back in 2021. Google’s technology is called LaMDA, which is short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications.
“LaMDA’s conversational skills have been years in the making. Like many recent language models, including BERT and GPT-3, it’s built on Transformer, a neural network architecture that Google Research invented and open-sourced in 2017”, explained Google at the time of introducing the chatbot.
LaMDA came under limelight when back in June of last year, it had allegedly gained sentience. The claim was made by an Google employee, however, he didn’t had enough proof to back his claims at that time.
Google also seems to have no plans at the time to make LaMDA public, as it fears that it could affect society in a negative way where answers from the AI would be based on human-made data, full of misinformation, bias, and racism, delivering unpleasant results. Whatever the case may be, Google already has its counter plan in works if at any given point of time things go sideways for the company.
Can Chat GPT be an alternative to Google Search?
In its current stage, No, Chat GPT cannot serve as an alternative to Google Search. This is because the credibility of chatbots like Chat GPT is still not at a stage where it can be fully trusted over Google Search. Chat GPT can be creative to no end, but it cannot always be factually correct. It may come up with information that is old and is not applicable in current times.
If at any point in future, Chat GPT or other chatbots become as credible as Google, then the search giant would already have countermeasures set in place so no one can do what Google does best.