He has read all of Shakespeare, prides himself on poetry, and has an opinion on everything. Unbeatable, GPT Cat? Since December, the world has become acquainted with the artificial intelligence developed by the Open AI company. The general public has discovered the power of this freely accessible tool, which could integrate search engines, if not replace them in the future.
Capable of answering almost all questions, the conversational robot developed by Open AI, a Californian research company, has swallowed astronomical quantities of texts whose meaning it does not understand. However, he can restore the context and summarize them in the manner of a human. Trained by a team of around 100 developers, Chat GPT has already been queried by more than a million Internet users in December.
Microsoft in the ranks
A blow to play for Microsoft, which seized the opportunity. The software giant has already invested a billion dollars in Open AI, following in the footsteps of Elon Musk. But the group intends to go further. On January 11, Microsoft entered into discussions with Sam Altman, one of its founders, to take a 49% stake for $10 billion. A sum that would first be advanced in the form of cash before being transformed into capital in the coming years, suggests the American online investigative media Semafor.
The maneuver is strategic. “Chat GPT is a game-changer for Microsoft,” comments Silicon Valley star analyst Daniel Ives. By integrating Chat GPT into its search engine, Bing, the group could finally get its revenge on Google, which still dominates 92% of the market. “Satya Nadella will not repeat the same mistakes as in the past,” insists Dan Ives about the CEO of Microsoft. For fear of antitrust, Microsoft had indeed forbidden certain operations.
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The results obtained by Chat GPT are stunning. “Search engines have been built so far to respond to keywords, recalls Stéphane Roder, founder of the artificial intelligence consulting firm, AI Builders in Paris. However, the analysis work was still carried out by a human”. With Chat GPT, there is no longer any need to rummage through an extensive list of sites: “ask him for a hotel facing south with a swimming pool, he has the solution”.
Something to reshuffle the cards between the two behemoths. Such a technological leap endangers Google’s advertising model. It was by displaying links to advertisements that the giant still achieved 52% of its turnover in the third quarter of 2022. The Mountain View group has measured the danger well: in December, management declared an alert ” red” in the face of the spectacular progress made by GPT-3, the artificial intelligence program used by Chat GPT, reports the New York Times.
Soon GPT-4
The game is not over yet. Because most search engines, Google first and foremost, already integrate machine learning functions when ranking results. “Everyone uses them,” confirms Sridhar Ramaswamy, former vice president in charge of advertising at Google and founder of the search engine Neeva. In this area, Google remains one step ahead. The large language models (LLM) used by Chat GPT are based on work launched by Google and published by its researchers in 2017.
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In addition, Google intends to retaliate. Contacted, he reserves his own announcements in the field of artificial intelligence for February 8. As for Chat GPT, Open Ai has yet to prove that it can be profitable and find use cases. According to a tweet from Sam Altman, the “cost of running is mind boggling”. Running Chat GPT would cost over $100,000 a day. A burden for Open AI which was a non-profit association until March 2019 and whose income remains capped.
Before anything else, the emergency will therefore be to ensure the necessary funds for Chat GPT to develop. LThe data mined by Open AI, which includes web archives, movie scripts and Wikipedia, ends for now in the last quarter of 2021, limiting its use as a search engine. While a new update to its program, GPT-4, is expected next year, the company has announced the imminent arrival of a paid version. In 2023, Open Ai expects to generate $200 million in revenue and up to $1 billion the following year.
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