The chatbot battle has been joined—and we could see the biggest realignment of Big Tech power in more than a decade as a result. On Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled his company’s answer to ChatGPT, a chatbot-based interface called Bard that can summarize internet search results. Baidu, the Chinese internet search giant, announced that it will debut an A.I.-powered, English-language chatbot called “Ernie Bot”—also with search functionality—by March. Microsoft announced today the launch of a chatbot interface for its Bing search engine, powered by a new model called Prometheus that was developed by OpenAI. And a number of startups have already launched search engines with chatbot options, such as You.com, or plan to, such as South Korea’s Naver search platform.
It will be interesting to see which of these chatbot search interfaces win over users in the long term. But there’s a good chance that Microsoft, thanks to its alliance with OpenAI and the viral popularity of ChatGPT, will jump to an early lead and pose a serious threat to Google. There are two reasons for this, both having to do with first mover advantage: First, consumers already know and love ChatGPT, so there’s brand recognition and a strong likelihood that a good portion of the fans of ChatGPT will migrate to Bing for search, probably to Google’s detriment. And the fact that OpenAI already released ChatGPT and it has been used by many millions of people (ChatGPT had 672 million users visit its website in January alone, according to new data from internet traffic tracking site SimilarWeb) means that OpenAI has a lot of data to make its Bing-Prometheus mashup a better chatbot.
