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OpenAI, the company that until half a year ago you had not heard of, continues to drive the tech giants crazy and shake up the search market.
Last week, Microsoft announced the addition of a ChatGPT-like component to its search engine, aka Bing, and managed to push the application to the opening ten of the top applications in the App Store.
Meanwhile, Google launched its own version of the AI chat, Bard, but in a demonstration of the technology, it provided an incorrect answer when it wrote that James Webb was the first photographer to take a picture of an extraterrestrial planet.
According to NASA, this is simply not true.
While all artificial intelligence models will certainly go wrong often, Google's failure to test the answers ahead of time, before the ceremonial launch, indicates that the acceleration of the company's processes, in order to catch up with the technological gaps in front of its competitors, may to be in the dark
How did it happen that Google is late to the AI race?
Google should have been way ahead of everyone else in the AI race.
It has been investing in AI technology for years with the help of some of the leading experts in the field, but in this case, it was caught off guard—and not just by OpenAI.
Even before the current race, Amazon's Alexa became a household name in the field of AI-powered voice assistants.
Although Google has shown impressive consumer AI applications, it ran into opposition on ethical grounds when it showed Google Duplex's ability to call restaurants and place orders while pretending to be human.
This is not the first time that Google has encountered weighty ethical questions regarding the nature of the technologies it develops, and despite years of work in the field, it seems that the company is afraid of undermining the cash cow, aka its search and advertising engine.
That may be why what we've gotten so far from Google around AI has been a sort of steady stream of AI-driven features added to the system over time, rather than a big, expensive search makeover that could kill its profits.
But the current situation brought Google out of its typical slumber and forced it to speed up processes it was not yet ready for.
BARD's hasty launch into the world, accompanied by statements about its integration into the Chrome OS system, as part of the emergency protocol announced by the company, was apparently ahead of its time.
Meanwhile, in what seems like an attempt to buy time, Google is releasing features like multisearch, which expands web search to include integrated text and images, map improvements, and new features in Google Translate.
According to the company's announcement, these features will be available globally in the coming months.
All of this could have been truly impressive, if not for the problematic situation in which the company has lost its relative advantage against its competitors, and for the first time, after years of almost exclusive control of the market, it finds itself lagging behind.
The sudden rise of Bing
Microsoft, however, used its launch event to focus fully on AI as it introduced an AI engine based on OpenAI and GPT3.5, now available both within Bing and as a built-in feature in the Edge web browser.
According to the company, this is its language processing model "more powerful than ChatGPT".
But Microsoft's strongest marketing move was when it made using the feature conditional on downloading the Bing app and making it Microsoft's default.
As a result of the move, the Bing app is now ranked in the top 10 of the US App Store, and second in the productivity app category, just behind Gmail.
For comparison, before artificial intelligence entered our lives, Bing was ranked 160th.
Meanwhile, BARD's little mistake caused Google to lose $100 billion in value.
While Google and Microsoft are the biggest players in this race, OpenAI manages to stay ahead of both of them with more and more apps using its technology through integrations being added every day.
Microsoft's current comparative advantage lies largely in the fact that it is not starting from scratch, but is building on research that OpenAI has already done exclusively for it.
And what happens in the rest of the ecosystem?
Today, a search for the term "ChatGPT" still returns many apps that offer a ChatGPT-like experience and imply that they are associated with OpenAI, assuming users don't really care.
Indeed, consumers are hungry to see AI in action and they don't care if it's generating text, images, videos, music, or anything else they're given.
The latest developments also breathe life back into the App Store which has become obsolete over the years, when it prevented technologies like NFT, Blockchain and Web3 from operating in their full functionality on Apple's platforms.
It turns out that even Apple can't stop the madness that is happening now.
How is this going to affect your SEO work?
While many praise ChatGPT as a means to help produce more accurate content products and improve search engine rankings, the very existence of this tool on the market threatens the status of search engines as a source of information.
If until now you have focused your organic SEO efforts on Google, it is possible that in the coming months you will also want to consider promotion on Bing.
But above all, the practice of retrieving answers without reference to the source, as OpenAI does, may be convenient for the user, but may collapse everyone who invested in the content as a strategy for the organic promotion of the business.
At the current point in time, everything is changing quickly and you really don't know what a child will be.
We will of course continue to update on developments.
Marketing and digital
MarTech
Tags
SEO
artificial intelligence
Google
Microsoft
