The leaked news regarding the intentions of Baidu, the most important Chinese search engine, to adopt a system similar to ChatGPT is only the latest concerning the world of search engines after the OpenAI machine learning system was launched. Earlier this month, Microsoft revealed it invested $10 billion in OpenAI and plans to add ChatGPT to its Bing search engine. Google answered with Google Sparrow, another machine learning system. The launch of ChatGPT immediately rekindled discussions about the nature of this alleged artificial intelligence, its possibilities, and its limits, and the competitors’ new systems will further increase them.
The OpenAI project was launched in late 2015 with the stated aim of developing artificial intelligence for the good of all humanity. Many books and articles have been written about artificial intelligence, and for years, the systems that somehow implemented it remained in niches. IBM has been developing its Watson system for years, also with important purposes such as medical diagnoses. ChatGPT is a so-called chatbot, a software capable of holding a conversation that can also write articles on a certain topic.
The reactions after the launch of ChatGPT have been diverse between interest and concern. Without getting into the discussions of what artificial intelligence is, it soon became clear that ChatGPT has limitations and doesn’t always interpret requests correctly, so in some cases, it ends up providing wrong answers.
Despite the limitations of ChatGPT, Microsoft decided to invest heavily in OpenAI, at least $10 billion. The company founded by Bill Gates intends to create a synergy between ChatGPT and its search engine Bing to try to break Google’s dominance. The answer came with the announcement of Google Sparrow, a system created by DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company that is part of Alphabet, the holding company that includes a number of companies, starting with Google. Almost simultaneously, news of a similar project by Baidu, defined as the Chinese Google, was leaked.
In essence, despite the discussions and controversies surrounding these chatbots, the giants behind some of the world’s main search engines intend to integrate machine learning systems. The billions in investments suggest that there’s something far more important than a fad that could be forgotten tomorrow.
In the 1990s, when search engines were new to the web, you just entered a few keywords. Today, many people enter actual questions expecting an answer from the search engine. This already makes a machine learning system useful. More sophisticated requests such as product recommendations could take search engines to a new level of complexity where chatbots interpret the user’s tastes and needs. In the coming years, we might see interesting evolutions.
