Google management ‘issued code red’ over ChatGPT impact on search engine business

Google’s management has reportedly issued a “code red” for the company’s search engine business amid the release of the experimental chatbot ChatGPT created by the artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI.

Since its release, the AI chatbot has led to widespread speculation that it could potentially revolutionise several industries and might even replace tools like Google’s search engine with its ability to understand and generate human-like responses to a range of queries.

While AI experts note that the bot still has plenty of room for improvement, Google’s management declared a “code red” following its launch, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

Google’s chief Sundar Pichai reportedly directed several groups in the company to refocus their efforts to address the threat posed by ChatGPT on the company’s search engine business.

Even though Google is among the many companies that helped build the chatbot, the search giant appears concerned of the potential of several smaller companies to leverage the AI technology.

Unlike conventional search engines that use keyword matching to share results, ChatGPT uses advanced algorithms and AI to understand users’ queries and the intent behind them.

“The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests,” OpenAI noted in a blog post.

The chatbot, however, still has some limitations, including not being able to browse the internet or access any external information.

Its training data, based on which it provides answers, includes books, articles and websites that only go up to 2021.

The AI Chatbot also sometimes provides answers that are factually incorrect, but sound plausible with the platform’s developers also acknowledging that its answers are “often excessively verbose” when responding to requests.

The system may sometimes even confidently provide replies to some questions that can be wildly wrong, some users have spotted.

“We know that many limitations remain. We plan to make regular model updates to improve in such areas... We are excited to carry the lessons from this release into the deployment of more capable systems, just as earlier deployments informed this one,” OpenAI said in its blog post.

But with over 80 per cent of Google’s revenue coming from digital ads last year, the company may be reluctant to deploying its own free chatbot LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, as a competitor to ChatGPT.

“We are absolutely looking to get these things out into real products and into things that are more prominently featuring the language model rather than under the covers, which is where we’ve been using them to date. But, it’s super important we get this right,” Google’s head of AI Jeff Dean said last week, according to CNBC.