Due to the interesting launch of ChatGPT, many market experts and SA contributors have recently questioned Alphabet’s
Google. The AI chatbot game is not new since
Microsoft already released its own version of the AI chatbot game,
Tay AI, in 2016 and Meta did likewise in August 2022 with BlenderBot 3 AI.
We must also point out that Google has been developing LaMDA [Language Model for Dialogue Applications], a comparable product, since 2020. Most importantly, Google researchers created the ChatGPT platform in its initial iteration in 2017.
Blake Lemoine, one of the platform’s engineers, had oddly thought that the LaMDA AI platform was sentient at the time.
Market reports claim that LaMDA was never released because the conversational platform of the AI chatbot did not work with Google’s current advertising model, which generated 81% of its revenue in FY2021. Since the AI chatbot has been known to mimic human speech from the internet and spread some forms of hate speech, fake news, racist and sexist remarks, as well as a high degree of informative inaccuracy, there may also be reputational hazards.
The LaMDA AI platform is currently not accessible to the general public and is only accessible to a select number of AI developers via the AI Test Kitchen. But based on preliminary analysis by multiple reports online, there are many parallels between the two, offering a conversational tool that is application-specific.
We are not persuaded that ChatGPT represents a serious danger to Google, despite the fact that it may have been resting on its laurels for some time. Although the latter continues to be a massive technological and experience revolution, we believe this moment will be similar to the Instagram moment for Meta in 2012, Snapchat Stories in 2016, and
TikTok in 2020. The company has so far successfully fended off the majority of these threats, maintaining its lion’s share of the worldwide social media market at 67.13% by November 2022.
It is therefore not very optimistic to expect that Google may likewise defeat this challenge given Sundar Pichai’s ability to date. According to reports, the corporation has started a “Code Red operation” in response to ChatGPT’s phenomenal popularity. By reportedly mid-2023, the CEO has given orders to several departments, including research, trust, and safety, to quickly build and introduce rival AI prototypes and goods.
