OpenAI faced two outages in December, causing hours-long disruption to its Sora and ChatGPT platforms. To recall, the company made ChatGPT Search available to all users for free this month. While this doesn’t directly have anything to do with the outages, it does raise questions about the company’s ability to scale. If it intends to take on a giant like Google, it will have to sort out its issues.
The firm’s Google rival ChatGPT search is having its fair share of issues. Just two days ago, the British news agency The Guardian fooled the search engine into generating false results to its prompts. It achieved this by adding hidden texts to some websites that it had created for this purpose. ChatGPT Search, while crawling these sites, ignored all the negative reviews on a product and delivered an entirely positive response as a result of the hidden text.
This is not something new for search engines. In the last 20 years, search engines have evolved to deal with misleading texts on websites. These tactics pose a huge risk for large language model training. These models not only produce these results but also use them to reason and produce future responses. ChatGPT would quickly need to find a solution to this as its interactive nature and the ability to answer follow-up questions will expose these shortcomings even more clearly.
Google of course has a history of dealing with these challenges. It learned how to differentiate between normal text and text that was written in the same color as the background (and hence not viewable to the reader). It also evolved to deal with many other black hat SEO techniques by prioritizing quality content. It even employed humans to manually review websites, though one could argue AI should be able to do a better job of it today.
The bottom line is that no matter what ChatGPT search comes up with, it is likely that Google will still be better. OpenAI is only just learning the struggles of providing accurate answers to human queries, and it will take time for it to perform at Google’s level. Even if the technology evolves to a similar level for both companies, Google will still have an edge as it owns a whole network of partners, including local businesses, maps, events, and other useful data that OpenAI doesn’t have access to. Even though ChatGPT has had a headstart in AI, using that AI to run a search engine is still a tough job and Google is likely to stay ahead, even if its AI is weaker. In our view, Google’s dominance is safe, at least while OpenAI figures out how to deal with issues Google solved years ago.
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