These days, if you want to find a good moving company, you can ask your favorite search engine – Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo perhaps – for advice.

After wading through half a page of classifieds, you get a ton of links to articles about moving companies. You click on one of the links and finally read how to choose a good ‘un’. But not for much longer.

In a big reveal this week, Google announced plans to add its latest AI chatbot, LaMDA, to the Google search engine. The chatbot is called the “Bard”.

I hope William Shakespeare’s descendants sue. It is not the job of arguably the greatest writer in the English language to answer mundane questions about finding a good moving company. But he will.

Ask the Bard how, and he’ll answer almost immediately with a logical eight-step process: starting with reading reviews and getting quotes, and ending with including references.

No more flipping through pages of links; the answer is immediate. To make the Shakespearean insult even worse, you can even ask the bard to respond in the form of a sonnet.

Welcome to the AI ​​race!

Microsoft responded quickly to Googlesaying it would integrate the ChatGPT chatbot into its search engine, Bing.

That was only recently Microsoft announced it would invest $10 billion in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, on top of a previous investment of $1 billion or more in 2022.

ChatGPT has already been added to Microsoft’s Teams software. You can expect it to appear in Word soon where it will write paragraphs for you. In Outlook, it composes entire emails, and in PowerPoint, it helps you prepare slides for your next lecture.

Not to be outdone, Chinese web giant Baidu has done just that came into action. It recently announced the latest chatbot would be released in March. Baidu’s chatbot will be trained on 50% more parameters than ChatGPT and will be bilingual. In response, the company’s share price rose 15%.

AI-powered search

Google, along with the other tech giants, has been using AI in search for many years. This is how AI algorithms order the search results that Google returns.

The difference now is that instead of searching based on the words you type, these new search engines will try to “understand” your query. And instead of sending you links, they also try to answer the questions.

But new chatbot technology is far from perfect. ChatGPT sometimes just makes things up. Chatbots can also be tricked into saying things that are inappropriate, offensive or illegal – although researchers are working hard to reduce this.

Existential risk

For Google, this has been described by the New York Times not only as an AI race, but one race to survive.

When ChatGPT first came out late last year, alarm bells started ringing at the search giant. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin returned from their outside activities to oversee the response.

Ad revenue from Google’s search results contributes about three-quarters to the $283 billion Annual sales from Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

If people start using AI chatbots to answer their questions instead of Google Search, what will happen to that income?

Even if Google users stay with Google, but get their answers directly from the bard, how is Google going to make money if links stop being clicked?

Microsoft may see this as an opportunity for its search engine, Bing, to catch up with Google. It cannot be ruled out that this will happen. In the 1990s, before Google came out, I was very happy with AltaVista – the best search engine of the moment. But I quickly jumped ship as soon as a better search experience arrived.

Nadella clearly senses a once-in-a-generation moment to reclaim huge chunks of lost ground to Google https://t.co/PToHGDokvH

— Dave Lee (@DaveLeeFT) February 7, 2023

Will the AI ​​race lead to budget cuts?

Google had previously not made its LaMDA chatbot available to the public due to concerns about abuse or misunderstanding. In fact, it fired one of its engineers, Blake Lemoine, after firing him claimed LaMDA was aware.

There are plenty of risks associated with big tech’s rush to bolster the future of AI search.

First, if tech companies don’t make as much money selling links, what new revenue streams will they create? Will they try to sell information obtained from our interactions with search chatbots?

And what about people who will use these chatbots for basic purposes? They can be perfect for writing personalized and persuasive messages to scam unsuspecting users – or flood social media with conspiracy theories.

Not to mention we’ve already seen ChatGPT do a good job answer most homework questions. For now, public schools in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, Western Australia and Tasmania have banned their use to prevent cheating, but it seems unlikely they could (or should) ban access to Google or Bing.

A new interface

When Microsoft launched Windows, it was the beginning of a revolution. Instead of typing cryptic instructions, we could just point and click on a screen. That revolution continued with the launch of Apple’s iPhone – an interface that shrunk computers and the web into the palm of our hands.

Perhaps the biggest impact of AI-powered search tools will be on how we interact with the myriad of increasingly smart devices in our lives. We’ll stop pointing, clicking, and touching, and instead start having full conversations with our devices.

We can only speculate about what this could mean in the longer term. But how we interact with computers is about to change, for better or for worse.