Faced with OpenAI’s SearchGPT, Google must resolve its own AI dilemma first

livemint.com:

Arguably the best business model ever invented, other than the illegal one of peddling drugs, is search. This is a $200 billion plus market today, with gross margins estimated at 60%, growing at 10% every year and projected at $371 billion by 2031. As we all know, one player dominates this lucrative market: Google, with a highly enviable 90%-plus market share.

No one has been able to get anywhere close, with even mighty Microsoft’s Bing a light year behind at No. 2 with a 3.7% share. Besides the acclaimed superiority of Google’s search algorithms and its effective use of AI, another big reason is network effects and the fact that Google has now become a verb.

What you need, you ‘google.’ No wonder that every tech company on Earth is trying to get a piece of the action, but has so far only managed to gather crumbs left behind by Google. Despite onslaughts by Microsoft and Yahoo, and pretenders like DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha, Google has never really been under any threat. Until now, that is, with a new technology which threatens to upset its cosy world.

The technology is Generative AI, and it is perhaps the first credible threat to Google’s throne. This was apparent when ChatGPT was launched by OpenAI. Suddenly, we had another way of finding information and content out there, but a way that seemed more intuitive, warm and human than the cold ‘ten blue links’ of Google’s search results.