It’s happening. OpenAI’s(Google) losing the AI race.
- Remember those days when ChatGPT was everyone’s topic of conversation? Yes, you do.
- Remember those days when BeReal was everywhere? Yes, you do.
- Remember those days when Vine was the most trending app? Uh, maybe?
- What about when YikYak was everyone’s app? Yik-what?
Go back to high school. There’s always that popular girl in school for a few years. Ten years later, you’ll probably say, “Gosh, I haven’t heard that name in years.”
There are no hypes that last forever. Every single business or venture will decline one day or another.
- Yes, WhatsApp won’t be used forever.
- Apple is going to be historical.
- Teslas are going to be sold as antiques.
- On the one hand, if you’re working on a product, hype is what you’re looking for.
- On the other hand, you will have an enormous challenge dealing with the “post-hype.”
I’ve written an article analyzing how Google Bard will destroy ChatGPT because it’s a long-term game, and Google has the upper hand in terms of market dominance. ChatGPT has a better product, but that doesn’t mean they’ll win the long race.
This was quite the trending article reaching 178,000 people. There were quite the mixed emotions towards it. Some agreed that Google had the upper hand. Others think that ChatGPT has a “first-movers advantage.”
Now let’s resume the conversation. Ever since then, Google has been developing and waiting for the hype to fade. Their stock has been on the rise because many believe in their AI investments.
Finally, OpenAI made a few moves that made me believe that they’re moving more toward the losing side of the race. Let me elaborate; it’ll be fun.
Google’s Actions In The AI Race
They rushed to create Bard, and it was (and still is) not comparable to ChatGPT. I used both of them many times. They’re similar, but if I had to choose, I’d choose ChatGPT at the moment.
Google’s database of information is still the competitive edge in play. But they’re not really utilizing it perfectly well. Yet, in time, it’ll be better.
Google is going all in. They’re working on another AI product, Gemini AI, that is supposedly as good as GPT 4. We’ll have to wait and see. It should be released end of the year.
So what happens to Bard? Bard, in my opinion, was a perfectly launched strategic product. It was more of a strong gesture. Google wanted to clarify to all its investors and the world that they’re heavily invested in the AI race.
But no good product is rushed. Now that the hype is over, they’re starting the real work. The freak-out and red alert has passed, sort of.
Aside from Gemini, which I have high hopes for, there’s NotebookLM — an AI notebook used in the educational sector. That, in my opinion, is an ed-tech game-changer.
Think about it this way, if you really wanted to have an impact with AI, then you’d really think of tapping into the educational market. Google did that perfectly. ChatGPT, on the other hand, we’ll get to that in a moment.
Let’s take a look at the search trends of ChatGPT (and Bard.)
There’s almost no comparison between both of those. But if you look closely, you’ll see that ChatGPT is starting to decline. It has peaked for months, and now people got bored of talking about it.
If you do consider that Bard was a strategically placed product that only aims as a shield against the hits Google would take from the ChatGPT hype, then it did quite a good job.
Now let’s talk about ChatGPT and OpenAI.
OpenAI’s Actions In The AI Race
They’ve developed the product of the decade, in my opinion. I would say that such hype almost never happens. I’m sure that Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO (who, by the way, has quite the story), knew that the day when the hype would fade would come.
OpenAI has always been more of a scientist rather than a marketeer. They just work on developing quite a good product with no strings attached. So when they started developing ChatGPT, there was a segment of people that had huge objections. Can you guess who I’m talking about?
Professors and teachers in the educational world. I’ll remind you when I said that Google’s smartly working on an AI notebook that has access to the data you provide, not the global internet data (this is very important.)
Now when professors started to object to ChatGPT, what OpenAI did is that they launched a text classifier, which tells the world whether the text is most likely AI-written or not.
I had a major problem with this in terms of vision. How could you be an AI company that is developing a smart chatbot with text that sounds like humans but then tells the world whether it’s AI or human? It sounded like a distorted vision.
But then something happened that was interesting — they stopped working on the AI classifier and made it “unavailable.”
They shut it down (maybe temporarily, but it has been quite a while.)
So this is how the educational conversation is going now.
Teacher: “What the h*ck is going on? Everyone’s using AI bots. How are we going to educate them properly?”
ChatGPT: “Well, we launched an AI text identifier for you to know which students are using AI.”
Teacher: “Great!”
ChatGPT: “Oh, wait, nah, it’s not going to work out. We’re canceling it.”
Teacher: “???”
Google: “We’re creating a notebook AI that you could upload content to it. So that students would be using AI, but only on the content you choose.”
I’ll circle back to the start of this article — the business game is always in the long run, not a one-year hype.
Finally, OpenAI made one final move that many consider to be prepping for a downfall of the hype — they launched ChatGPT enterprise.
Don’t get me wrong, starting a B2B product is always good in their case. There are reports that ChatGPT is generating a billion dollars a year. So you can imagine how an enterprise business model could double this.
But the truth is, ChatGPT is far from ready to become an enterprise product like Salesforce or Slack. To this day, I consider this (and all other AI chatbots) to be an experimental product.
It’s quite a bold move to sell to businesses at this stage. But they might pull it off. Whether they hit it off or not, that does not change the fact that Google is now an official contender in the AI race.
- Their investors want them to succeed, and they’re buying more stocks.
- Their products are growing in demand, as usual. Hence, even with a product half as good as ChatGPT, Google will emerge victorious in the long run.
They have the resources. They have the money. Now, they have the time.
I love the AI race. I just purchased three other books about AI to read. But as much as I like writing articles. I like to engage more with you, the reader. So write a comment with your opinion, and let’s chit-chat (it’ll be fun.)