What if Google had released something similar to ChatGPT 10 years ago?
It's kind of ironic to see tech trailblazer Alphabet playing Fast Follower in declarative search. Certainly, Google could've released something on par with ChatGPT far sooner than 2023.
After two decades of utter global search supremacy (90% of total global search), Alphabet’s massive size, along with recent cullings of some very expensive moonshot attempts, appears to have hampered Google’s ability and/or desire to aggressively bring better search features to market. Given this sluggishness, it was only a matter of time before a worthy and more open competitor like ChatGPT pieced together and found quick market fit for a useful declarative search tool.
Now, Google is playing fast follower, quickly patching together its formidable in-house AI and Search tools to raise forthcoming declarative search competitor Bard, which some believe could be the quickest app to 1 billion users yet…
Richard Nieva, Alex Conrad & Kenrick Kai nicely detail Google’s conversational AI efforts dating back to 2016 and earlier, reminding us of the fierce public backlash to Duplex and the company’s track record of putting on the brakes when faced with ethical pickles.
Google has other business reasons to keep its AI work close to the vest. While it remains a major contributor in the open source movement, it’s also a big public company that needs to protect its IP and competitive advantage. “At some point though, it was difficult for Google, understandably, to release lots of their cutting edge models,” said David Ha, a former Google research scientist who Mostaque hired away to lead strategy at Stability AI. “They had their reasons to do that, sure. Some of which may be sound, but fundamentally, my interest is to democratize these models.”
Richard Nieva, Alex Conrad & Kenrick Kai - Forbes
My friend Thorman in VA fed this question to ChatGPT itself and received this answer…
"If a company had released ChatGPT (Conversational Generative Pre-trained Transformer) 10 years ago, it could have revolutionized the search experience. The technology might have enabled more natural conversations and more efficient search results. It could have used its language understanding capabilities to provide more accurate and personalized results. By predicting user intent, it could have improved the search process by reducing the need for cumbersome keyword queries. It could also have used its predictive capabilities to provide search results tailored to the user’s preference and needs. Additionally, ChatGPT's state-of-the-art AI technology could have enabled more powerful and faster ways for users to access and comprehend their search results. All of these features could have revolutionized the search experience and potentially altered the search landscape."
ChatGPT as prompted by Thorman
It appears that ChatGPT thinks Google could’ve “revolutionized the search experience” sooner.
Yesterday’s Bard launch advertising kerfluffle, which saw Google release an ad in which Bard clearly answers a question incorrectly, and the subsequent dive in Google stock price has spiced up this story a bit…
“In short, it's a worrying start in advanced AI for the largest search engine in existence, when a highly anticipated new feature is already spreading lies before even being launched to the public.”
Victor Tangermann, The Byte
The stakes are high. Hundreds of billions of dollars are up for grabs. Human search culture is still evolving. Our collective cognition is still developing.
How will the rise of declarative search affect our social intelligence?
Had declarative search been successfully developed, released and iterated earlier, would humanity be smarter today?
What do you think?