Google is waiting for the ruling on how regulators in Washington would want to level the playing field in the internet search industry,
However, it’s getting more evident that the search engine giant is facing a greater challenge from Sam Altman’s OpenAI.
Regulators view a US verdict on Monday, which concluded that Google had established an unlawful search monopoly, as a significant victory.
Meanwhile, several sources, investors, and analysts stated that Google’s supremacy is already being challenged by the growing number of individuals utilizing AI technologies, such as OpenAI’s well-known ChatGPT chatbot.
Arvind Jain, a former Google employee whose job involved the area of Search for a decade, gave his opinion on the matter. “I think for Google right now, AI (is) a much bigger deal than the ruling. AI is fundamentally changing how the search product also works.”
In contrast to the lengthy appeals process involved in these verdicts, which may take a long time to affect a market, Jain, who currently leads the enterprise search company Glean, claimed that AI’s impact was a lot quicker.
As the company that dominates 90% of the worldwide search industry and generates around $175 billion in sales annually, Google has long been associated with search.
Even Apple, which would rather construct most of the hardware and all of the software for its products, has paid a hefty amount to have Google serve as its default search engine.
However, even before a number of antitrust court cases are resolved, the days of receiving special treatment in exchange for a fee are past.
As part of its AI initiative, Apple revealed a collaboration with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into its next products.
It highlighted the non-exclusive nature of the agreement and raised the possibility of adding Google as a new partner.
Analysts predict that should Apple be forced to sever its Search partnership with Google, this will accelerate the company’s transition to artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search services.
The Microsoft-backed firm OpenAI said last month that it was also entering the search market with the gradual introduction of SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine that provides users with instant access to online content.
“AI is going to move faster than the speed that DOJ can move against Google,” a former top Google executive warned. “The whole monopoly will be over, in other words, with the speed at which AI will take over search.”
Wall Street experts and former Google executives both concur that Google has the raw material—a sizable language model—to train its AI and search engine, giving it the competitive edge in artificial intelligence. However, the company’s endeavors appear incohesive against OpenAI’s challenge.
The growth in popularity of generative AI surprised Google. Even though it was the very basis of the technology’s foundational development, it did not create a consumer product until much later, in early 2023, when ChatGPT had become the fastest-growing consumer app.
According to Rebecca Wettemann, CEO and principal analyst at research firm Valoir, “Google’s biggest threat may be Google itself. Key to adoption of any AI is trust, and its original missteps with Search Overviews showed that Google’s engineers were focused more on rapid releases than getting it right as it tries to keep up with the pace of OpenAI and others.”
Wettemann made reference to a recent Google product called AI Overviews, which uses AI to provide answers to queries that appear before links.
Publishers who were watching Google’s referral traffic drop took offense at it, and it was called out for providing inaccuracies that included encouraging visitors to consume glue and claiming that Barack Obama was a Muslim. Earlier in the year, Google withdrew the feature.
D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria thinks there is a connection between the regulatory scrutiny and the AI danger. “Part of the reason (the DOJ) are coming after Google’s business practices is that the market is in fact in flux right now and they want to make sure Google does not extend its current market dominance.”
Richard Socher, the CEO and creator of the AI search engine startup You.com and a former chief scientist at Salesforce, stated that although the antitrust verdict may not have a significant effect on Google just now, it should allow other companies to enter the search industry.
However, he noted that it will be “very hard” to challenge Google’s monopoly in the search market.
“No one has really made a big dent into Google search dominance yet … we’ll have to see if this will be yet another domino piece that will fall into place to actually give consumers some more choices, real choices.”
