Google readies to meet the ChatGPT challenge
The red alert at Google triggered by the November launch and viral popularity of ChatGPT, prompting the return of its founders (Sergey Brin has made his first code request in many years), will see the company make a very public splash on February 8.
The arms race sparked by OpenAI tool’s open launch, along with Microsoft’s upcoming plans to relaunch its Bing search engine that will include a faster version of ChatGPT, has prompted Google to announce it will be including a chatbot feature into 20 of its products in a bid to catch up and will demo its search engine with similar features, which it is expected to unveil on Wednesday. Until the noisy arrival of ChatGPT, Big Tech was treading carefully with machine learning; but a stampede is now underway.
In December, Google invested almost $400 million in Anthropic, one of the many companies to emerge in this environment, founded by former OpenAI employees with Claude, a similar product to ChatGPT, still in closed beta, presumably with the aim of adding an assistant that summarizes the results of a search in a text.
The main problem with such an approach is cost. Generating the answers provided by conversational engines requires heavy consumption of computing resources that must be carried out in the cloud, and not one powered by water vapor. Which is why much of…
