Since ChatGPT launched in December I’ve been using it for all sorts of thing from building meal plans through to debugging and refactoring code. I would say that within 5 minutes of me discovering it and using it, it had become one of the core tools that I use as part of my day job.
It truly is an incredible resource, even in its infancy, and for me it has replaced Google as my first port of call for a lot of tasks.
The user experience of the platform, with its contextual, specific and concise responses, gives you the impression that you are chatting with a human expert, which is a powerful thing.
If you had a question or an issue that needed a solution would you prefer to:
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trawl through a number of different websites via Google or;
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ask an expert directly who will give you an answer in a few seconds?
I know which one I would choose!
Mulling all of this over I think it’s pretty clear that this technology is going to be really disruptive to the classic search-driven model of the web.
It presents an existential threat not only to Google, but also to the millions of information based websites who rely on both paid and organic Google traffic in order to survive. A tool that can just give you an expert answer in a few seconds renders a huge tranche of websites across the Internet completely redundant. I’m thinking recipe websites, health websites, technical resources like StackOverflow, financial resource websites. People will just stop visiting them unless they really stand out or have some sort of hook that AI chat cannot provide.
Google know this full well, which is why they haven't made their incredible LaMDA chat bot publically available yet (though they claim to be withholding it because it isn’t stable enough to give consistently accurate results). LaMDA itself is absolutely mind blowing and is almost certainly in a different league to ChatGPT. One Google engineer was so amazed by it that they believed it to be sentient.
The viral sensation that is ChatGPT has forced Google’s hand though, with Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai saying that 2023 will mark a “point of inflection” for how the firm uses AI in its products.
In my opinion, if Google don’t launch something like ChatGPT in 2023, they will be too late, and will rapidly start to lose market share.
Given how powerful AI chat is from UX perspective, as soon as Google launch LaMBDA to the public, it will very quickly overtake their classic search interface as the primary route for people looking for information. But the big question, which I am sure they are wrestling with, is how will they monetise this and continue to support the millions of sites rely on search traffic to drive advertising revenue?
I suspect that rather than launch a standalone chat bot, they will integrate the chat bot’s response into their classic search result pages in an attempt to maintain their PPC revenue, buying them some time to figure how they can monetise it in the longer term.
Five years from now however, I think the Internet landscape will be very different. There will be significantly less advertising supported ‘resource’ style websites, as the drop in traffic due to AI chat will have rendered their business model unsustainable.
The classic search style interface of Google and Bing etc will continue to exist, helping to drive traffic to websites that are still relevant, such as e-commerce or brochure sites, however it will be heavily supplemented with AI chat based functionality, probably with the chat bots offering up various forms of promoted content such as links or product placements as part of their conversational answers.
E-commerce will continue to thrive as well, with websites integrating AI chat into their support and sales communication systems, allowing them to find huge efficiencies and dramatically improve their value proposition.
It will certainly be an interesting and memorable year for the development of the web, and I for one can’t wait to see how this plays out!
