Buccheit believes that the AI-based chatbot will eliminate Google’s most profitable product – Search Engine Results Page (SERP) – from where it makes most of the company’s revenues. And even if, the search giant catches up on artificial intelligence (AI), it won’t be able to fully deploy it without destroying the most valuable part of its business. Ever since OpenAI’s Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) was launched in November last year, it has become insanely popular because of its immense capabilities, be it content writing through simple prompts, or organizing people’s meals, planning a holiday party, or even writing a song, and much more. Within a few days of its release, ChatGPT had managed to garner more than one million users within a week, according to a tweet from OpenAI employee Sam Altman. Since the AI tool is designed to understand and respond to user inquiries intuitively, it has quickly become a favorite website for millions of users to ask queries. The fast-growing popularity of ChatGPT is creating alarms for Google, which is causing it to worry about the future of its traditional internet search engine, as the AI-based chatbot could very soon reinvent or even replace it. It could even take over some human jobs. “Google may be only a year or two away from total disruption. AI will eliminate the Search Engine Result Page, which is where they make most of their money. Even if they catch up on AI, they can’t fully deploy it without destroying the most valuable part of their business,” Paul Buccheit, the creator of Gmail wrote in a series of tweets. He also goes on to provide a detailed explanation of how Google could be pushed out of business with the browser’s URL/Search bar getting replaced with an AI bot like ChatGPT: “The way I imagine this happening is that the URL/Search bar of the browser gets replaced with AI that autocompletes my thought/question as I type it while also providing the best answer (which may be a link to a website or product),” Paul added. “The old search engine backend will be used by the AI to gather relevant information and links, which will then be summarized for the user. It’s like asking a professional human researcher to do the work, except the AI will instantly do what would take many minutes for a human.” Paul points out that ChatGPT will also do the same thing to the Search Engine Result Page that Google did to the pre-internet business – Yellow Pages. While the Yellow Pages used to be a great business, Google made everyone stop using them with the rise of the Internet and Google Search. In order to compete with ChatGPT, Google is developing its own version of the OpenAI-based AI model. It is rumored that many AI products are expected to be announced at this year’s Google annual conference for developers. Even if they do so, Paul believes that the global search giant will have to risk destroying their most valuable asset – its search engine – to completely deploy AI.
