OpenAI is eating Google alive. Popcorn at the ready for a tech battle royale...

AS CHATGPT DEMOLISHES THE LANDSCAPE FOR GOOGLE, CHRIS STOKEL-WALKER GETS OUT HIS CRYSTAL BALL

- CHRIS STOKEL-WALKER

When OpenAI slipped out ChatGPT in November 2022, the company behind it had little idea how successful it would be. Neither did the rest of the tech world, including Google.

Both OpenAI and Google would quickly find out. Within two months, ChatGPT had 100 million users. Headlines talked about the changing paradigm of the AI revolution. Google began to panic. So too did its shareholders, seeing the company’s stock value drop nearly 40 per cent throughout 2022.

Shareholder love for AI

"Businesswise, the biggest change was Google's quick switch to developing more and more LLM [large language model] products of their own to compete with OpenAI," says Aleksandra Urman, a University of Zurich social scientist who has studied Google and its search products. Urman points out that Google held a “so-called ‘code red’ meeting” upon seeing ChatGPT's success, where they decided to go all-in on developing LLM-based AI.

"It seems that at some point, Google thought that they might lose all their customer base to ChatGPT, so they needed to offer a similar product by themselves," says Urman. The company, which had grown slow and sclerotic thanks to decades of dominance in the tech world, started to pick up the pace — and some would say, reduce its quality.

Initial tests of Google's ChatGPT competitor were not promising. The AI engine fumbled factual data about the James Webb Space Telescope in its first public demonstration in February 2023.