Google jumps into the fray as the AI battleground hots up

Last Wednesday, Reuters reported that the Artificial Intelligence (AI) bot ChatGPT reached an estimated 100mn active monthly users during January, a mere two months from launch, making it the “fastest-growing consumer application in history.” The very next day, Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai promised that “very soon people will be able to interact directly with our newest, most powerful language models as a companion to Search in experimental and innovative ways.” Tech circles are abuzz with a Google event on February 8. The invitation for the 40-minute YouTube live says the event will revolve around “using the power of AI to reimagine how people search for, explore and interact with information, making it more natural and intuitive than ever before to find what you need.”
The AI war had entered a new phase on November 30, 2022, with OpenAI launching the GPT-3-powered AI bot as a free public beta, inspiring awe, wonder, and fear in education, computer security, and finance. ChatGPT is a conversational large language model that can discuss almost any topic at an almost human level. It reads context and answers questions easily, though sometimes not accurately (improving its accuracy is a work in progress). ChatGPT has shaken up the tech industry, prompting a $10bn investment from Microsoft and causing Google to get a jolt. Also last Wednesday, OpenAI announced ChatGPT Plus, a $20 per month subscription service that will offer users’ faster response times, preferential access to ChatGPT during peak times, and priority access to new features. It’s an attempt to keep up with the intense demand for ChatGPT that has often seen the site deny users due to overwhelming activity.
Earlier this year, Google parent Alphabet declared a ‘code red’ over the meteoric rise of ChatGPT and even dragged co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin out of retirement to help. Google has plenty of AI technology, but it is mostly not open to the public. It has a chatbot language model called “LaMDA” (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) and an image-generation AI called “Imagen.” While OpenAI turns similar technologies into public products like DALL-E and ChatGPT that wow the world and earn the company oodles of attention, Google keeps everything internal and only ever talks about these projects in blog posts and research papers.
One result of Google’s productisation efforts, according to a CNBC report, is called ‘Apprentice Bard,” a chatbot that uses LaMDA technology enabling people to “ask questions and receive detailed answers similar to ChatGPT.” The report laid out numerous possible directions Google is experimenting with, like “an alternate search page that could use a question-and-answer format,” “prompts for potential questions placed directly under the main search bar” on the Google homepage, and a results page that shows “a gray bubble directly under the search bar, offering more human-like responses than typical search results.”
Writing about ChatGPT’s phenomenal growth, a UBS investment bank research note pointed out that by comparison, TikTok took nine months to reach 100mn monthly users, and Instagram about 2.5 years. “In 20 years following the Internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer Internet app,” Reuters quoted UBS researcher Lloyd Walmsley from the note. The UBS data comes from analytics firm Similar Web, which states that around 13mn unique visitors used ChatGPT every day in January, doubling the number of users in December. The next stage in this tech war will begin Wednesday, depending on what comes out of the Alphabet/Google stable.