By the time you read this column, you would have drowned in the sea of content around OpenAI’s stunning new product ChatGPT. The ‘best chatbot ever made’ rocketed to a million users in the first week of its launch, and it seems each of these one million people wrote something or the other about it. Rather than add to the gushing praise, incredulous reactions and even doomsday scenarios, I will focus on one intriguing aspect of ChatGPT: Will it replace search, and dethrone Google? Many mesmerised users seem to believe so – @jdkelly proclaims that “Google is done” (https://bit.ly/3PtCj1t ) , @mertbio confidently pronounces that “OpenAI just killed Google” (https://bit.ly/3hueNF6 ). OpenAI, incidentally, counts Google-competitor Microsoft as a major investor, and runs on its Azure platform. Before we get into whether Sundar Pichai is having sleepless nights about it, let us step back and see what ChatGPT really is.

The chatbot runs on OpenAI’s GPT3 large language model or LLM. GPT3, as I had written in this publication earlier (https://bit.ly/3RbHfbB ) has been trained on a massive body of text with 175 billion neural network parameters. If that does not boggle your mind, GPT4 expected anytime now will have 100 trillion plus! A language model uses machine learning to predict what the next word in a sentence should be based on the previous entry or prompt. They have been called “the world’s most powerful autocomplete technologies.” They feed on humongous numbers of sentences, facts, dialogue samples and learn the statistical patterns to assemble them in a coherent order; that is why they are so good at conversations and flow. Most of them, however, are not optimised for ‘truth;’ they do not really understand what they are saying, and whether that is correct or not. As an expert succinctly put it, “the model strategizes to be plausible instead of truthful.”

Search engines also do not really understand what they serve up, nor do they pretend to. Their job is to crawl the Web, and algorithmically surface the presumably most relevant search links to you. Presumably, because that is what a pure search engine would do; the business models driving search however mixes it with paid links, sponsored links and links which have been manipulated to appear upfront – what we prosaically know as Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Theoretically, ChatGPT can be used for search, but this version certainly has not been designed for that. For one, it does not crawl the Web and so cannot go out there and find the information you require and tell you from where it sourced it. Secondly, its knowledge base, or the text it was trained on, ends in 2021. So, it would still, for example, think that Queen Elizabeth reigns over England, or that we were still under the impression that Russia would never invade another country. Gary Marcus joked about his in his tweet (https://bit.ly/3PA3Z4L), where he said that “All you have to do (to make ChatGPT work) is … hook it up to … a …search engine!” However, that does not mean that ChatGPT could never do so. OpenAI’s cofounder John Schulman has gone on record saying that they could bring out an upgrade, tentatively called WebGPT, in the next few months.

Now, that could make Pichai and team sit up – a ChatGPT like interface, running on the mighty GPT4, powered by Microsoft’s cloud, and perhaps integrated with its search engine Bing. This is not to say that Google is not working on a similar product – Google Brain is a world-leading AI team, and Google owns probably the best deep learning engine available with DeepMind. Last year, Google released LaMDA which can pretty much do what ChatGPT does – chat with users on any subject under the sun. In fact, it was so life-like that one of Google’s engineers, Blake Lemoine, even claimed it was sentient, that it could feel or perceive things. Google has also announced that it will integrate LaMDA in its search, voice assistant, Gmail, Docs, and Drive. Its final objective, Pichai claims is to “create a conversational interface that allows people to retrieve any kind of information—text, visual, audio—across all Google’s products just by asking it to.”

A preview of what this would mean can be had by what some users are already doing with ChatGPT – @nishithshah claims he finally understood what football’s offside rule really is, something which would have taken him much longer with Google search (https://bit.ly/3Wgfi4f), and @tsrandall was so wowed by his experience that he likened it to the first time ever he used Google search (https://bit.ly/3FrdluV). My take is that whether ChatGPT dethrones Google or not, it will do a few good things: it will better our search experience, finally give Google a competitor so that it starts innovating, and it will hopefully make the advertiser-driven user interface of Google search become a user-driven UI instead.