Comment by headcanon
2 years ago
Its a conceit but not unjustified, they have been doing "AI" since their inception. And yeah, Sundar's term up until recently seems to me to be milking existing products instead of creating new ones, so it is a bit annoying when they act like this was their plan the whole time.
Google's weakness is on the product side, their research arm puts out incredible stuff as other commenters have pointed out. GPT essentially came out from Google researchers that were impatient with Google's reluctance to ship a product that could jeopardize ad revenue on search.
The point is if you have to remind people then you’re doing something wrong. The insight to draw from this is not that everyone else is misinformed about googles abilities (the implication), its that Google has not capitalized on their resources.
It's such a short sighted approach too because I'm sure someone will develop a GPT with native advertising and it'll be a blockbuster because it'll be free to use but also have strong revenue generating potential.
One problem I see with ChatGPT replacing search is, who is going to fund the content creators that generate the training data?
Bing Chat/Copilot already have ads and is free.