ChatGPT Presents a Real Challenge to Google
How language models might change how we use the internet.
Unless you have been living under a rock, you likely have heard of the trending AI model, ChatGPT. This technology is a GPT-3 language model that uses deep learning to understand text and language using billions of parameters trained with nearly a terabyte of data. If it is hard to imaging how large that actually is, the average kindle book is 2.6 megabytes which means the data ChatGPT has seen is comparable to around 2 million kindle books. I don’t know about you, but I am blown away by the fact a computer has that much knowledge in a single piece of software!
How does giving a computer a bunch of text create ChatGPT?
Under the hood, ChatGPT uses a form of machine learning called Natural Language Processing (NLP). This is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that aims to understand and interpret human language. While the details of these models can be fairly complex, they essentially break down sentences into more basic parts (e.g. words, punctuation, etc.) known as tokens. These tokens are then converted to a numerical representation, and inferences about the meaning of the original words can be made based on mathematical associations.
Whether or not the average person can decipher what these NLP models actually do, their impact on our daily lives are boundless. Any time you have searched on Google or any other search engine, you have taken advantage of this technology. In fact, NLP has more impact on your daily life than you think. Have you ever noticed how you started getting very specific advertisements on a website about something you were just thinking? Chances are you just posted about it on social media or searched it on Google. Companies use NLP to understand what you say and tell websites and advertisers exactly what to sell you. Other technologies like Siri/Alexa, autocomplete, voice texting, spam filters, and so much more do the same process to understand you and interact with you.
Microsoft has entered the chat
While NLP has been around for a while, people are talking about ChatGPT because it is the most advanced NLP model the world has seen yet. In particular, it is really good at understanding and inferring human language that has not been seen before. For example, trends on social media sites like TikTok and Instagram show videos of people using it to write songs in the same style of their favorite artists, writing code automatically, and even answering questions with refined answers.
Microsoft noticed OpenAI’s models very early on. In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion to the company as a partnership in developing their cloud platform, Azure. Only a year later, Microsoft made a licensing deal to leverage OpenAI’s GPT-3 model architecture (the same underlying model that ChatGPT uses). This is where things get interesting.
Not only is Microsoft trying to compete with other tech giants like Amazon and Google in the cloud space, but not they have a technology that could potentially render Google search irrelevant. Googling whatever is on your mind has become common place to anyone with access to the internet. A major flaw in this method of finding information that you may have noticed is if there is not a webpage about what you searched, Google can’t give you the answer. Have you seen this page before?
Now, think of a technology that can seemingly answer any question accurately within seconds without needing to find a webpage on the internet. Sound familiar?
The chart below shows the search engine market share as of December 2022:
Microsoft and everyone else has lost the battle of the search engine market in its current state. This monopoly by Google has made them the tech giant they are today. Microsoft has been working with OpenAI to improve Bing to challenge Google’s throne over internet searches allowing the AI to generate responses to queries on Bing. This means that even if your search matches nothing on the internet, Bing at some point in the future may have the ability to give a result anyways.
While it may be a few years before we see the ways ChatGPT will change Microsoft and their products, it has the ability to completely change the way we seek information online.
Joshua Anderson is currently working towards a Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh researching fairness in medical AI models.
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