It is exciting to see all the noise and activity around ChatGPT and the potential applications it opens up. Of course, it is likely overly hyped, at least in the short term.
Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella clearly sees an opportunity to disrupt Google's dominance in search. He even had his CFO run a call with investors, indicating that 1pt of search share is worth $2B. I think they were trying to indicate that even a small dent into Google could be very lucrative for them. I think others see less incremental gain for Microsoft (Bing, really?) but certainly a threat to Google's profit engine by changing the nature and expense of search.
The Economist "Is Google’s 20-year dominance of search in peril? ChatGPT-like tools could disrupt a lucrative business". And "The AI race heats up. ChatGPT is not the only game in town"
The large language models behind these user interfaces are hungry beasts, requiring a lot of data and processing. There seems a lot of promise to improve service chat bots in specific verticals, from restaurant recommendations to investor day presentation summaries. However, there's a lot of difficulty in trusting the answer applied to a more general query across the web, from a chatbot that 'hallucinates' as it predicts the next most probable word.
There are also many nefarious ways this technology can easily be applied. With the dangers of yet more inflammatory and fraudulent content on the net, quality walled gardens behind trusted brands may become even more valuable.
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