“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”
– Colin Powell
Hi Everyone,
Google lost more than $100 Billion dollars in valuation this week. The race for dominance in AI has started. Two months ago, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, which I talked about a few weeks ago, and it actually wrote a decent Desk of Brad for me… Amazing! The quality of the article was so good that no one who read that DOB called me out for using a Chatbot to do my work. ChatGPT is the fastest-growing online application in the history of the world, adding 100 million users in less than two months. Early this week, the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, launched a new version of Bing with ChatGPT fully integrated into the search experience.
Google realized that they were caught flat-footed and unprepared to address Microsoft’s head-on attack on Google’s search dominance. So they quickly and awkwardly rolled out their version of a competing solution called Bard. This application was nothing short of a complete disaster; it made mistakes and was not integrated with Google search. Shareholders dumped their stock at an unbelievable clip this week. Google has been dominating the market for the last 20 years, and virtually, overnight, they are in trouble. Now can they catch up and fix this situation? Maybe, probably, but they are playing from behind, chasing Microsoft’s innovations. They are going to have to burn tremendous amounts of human and financial capital just to maintain parody, while at the same time defending an empire around search engine revenue that they have spent years building.
It’s AWS vs. Azure all over again. Amazon got an early start and Microsoft has been chasing them ever since. Google has a serious problem, let me tell you why…. When you first started writing in English class, they asked you to pick a topic or read a book and write a report. As you progressed in school, you were asked to compare and contrast two ideas or authors. Your life, your decisions, virtually everything you do is make decisions between competing ideas, options, and opportunities. Because the dominant search paradigm was targeted keyword searches, we created workarounds. Internet browser developers invented tabs so you could go back and forth, and the internet is chock-full of rating and review sites to help you make choices.
AI will do all that work for you and present you with a range of options with an evaluation criterion suitable for you. How you, as an individual, make decisions, your personal algorithm for your choices will be understood and utilized to perfect the results for you. There is nothing personalized or perfect for you in a Google search result. Their version of personalization is chasing you around the internet with a display for a product that you recently looked at, and it’s super annoying.
Being comfortable in your empire and your technology is terribly risky. Undoubtedly, decades of foundational research have made ChatGPT possible, but look at how quickly the landscape has changed. In two months, we have the fastest-growing online product ever, Microsoft launched a revolutionary search product, and Google lost $100 billion dollars in market cap. I want everyone to go and watch the Microsoft Bing OpenAI launch, and the Google Bard launch this weekend. Read up on what’s happening. This will fundamentally change Tahzoo’s business, and we won’t be caught flat-footed. I have much more to say on this subject, and we’ll talk more on Monday. The change has happened, and we need to get smart and get going. We were an early provider of headless CMS solutions, and we are still making a living because we led in a market; we need to do the same in AI.
Let’s go be great!
Brad