OpenAI vs Google: Inside the battle of Gemini against ChatGPT ...
When OpenAI slipped out ChatGPT in November 2022, the company behind it had little idea how successful it would be. Neither did the rest of the tech world, including Google.
Both OpenAI and Google would quickly find out. Within two months, ChatGPT had 100 million users. Headlines talked about the changing paradigm of the AI revolution. Google began to panic. So too did its shareholders, seeing the company’s stock value drop nearly 40 per cent throughout 2022.
Google's Response
“Businesswise, the biggest change was Google’s quick switch to developing more and more LLM [large language model] products of their own to compete with OpenAI,” says Aleksandra Urman, a University of Zurich social scientist who has studied Google and its search products.
Urman points out that Google held a “so-called ‘code red’ meeting” upon seeing ChatGPT’s success, where they decided to go all-in on developing LLM-based AI.
“It seems that at some point, Google thought that they might lose all their customer base to ChatGPT, so they needed to offer a similar product by themselves,” says Urman.
Challenges Faced
The company, which had grown slow and sclerotic thanks to decades of dominance in the tech world, started to pick up the pace — and some would say, reduce its quality.
Initial tests of Google’s ChatGPT competitor were not promising. The AI engine fumbled factual data about the James Webb Space Telescope in its first public demonstration in February 2023.
Google ploughed on with the AI experimentation with its Gemini model — and has started to regain ground against OpenAI.
It has deprioritised the 10 blue links per page that made its reputation as the most trusted search engine, in favour of AI-generated summaries, powered by its own AI models.
Criticisms and Concerns
Google says that its AI search summaries are the future of search, and that users enjoy them and learn from them. Not everyone is convinced.
“There’s this big separation between what Google is telling us about the product over and over, and what real users are sharing,” says Lily Ray, a New York-based search consultant who has been tracking the degradation of Google searches in the AI era.
Part of Ray’s concern is that AI models are designed to answer confidently — even if wrong. Yet Google persists in its AI developments.
The Future
Google is still facing healthy competition from OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman. And as much as Google is inching into OpenAI’s world by developing its own AI systems, OpenAI is starting to consider competing with Google in other areas.
OpenAI has reportedly approached Samsung about putting its technology on smartphones by default, while also considering the purchase of a start-up firm set up by former Apple design chief Jony Ive.
If it were, and OpenAI was successful in snapping up Chrome, that could signal a major change in technology, and the arrival of a new era — overseen by OpenAI, rather than Google.
