What is Preventing Google From Becoming an Ai-First Company?

Last week, Alphabet Inc. announced its plan to become an AI-first company, in response to competition from OpenAI and Microsoft.

But several challenges are holding the search giant back:

1. ‍Search accuracy vs frequency.
   ‍On the one hand, Google wants its users to find the best answer to their queries as quickly as possible. But on the other hand, it needs them to stick around and make as many searches as possible to sell more ads.
   Ai is able to return the correct result in seconds, with no need to come back for more searches. This is clearly a trade-off.
2. ‍Innovator’s dilemma.
   ‍Following up on the previous point, search ads represent the bulk of Google's profits. An advanced Ai would make ads irrelevant.
   How to innovate while keep milking the cash cow?
3. Costs.
   ‍It's notorious how much computing resources and cash ChatGPT is burning. And it's not even searching the internet, yet!
   Morgan Stanley estimated that answering a search query using language processing costs about seven times as much as a standard internet search.
4. Regulatory concerns.
   Google's growing power has made it a target of data-protection and government bodies.
   Since generative Ai is inherently prone to abuse and misinformation, it could be a risky venture for the search giant. Racists or biased results could cause a huge backlash when placed near the Google name.

👉 Conclusion 👈

‍Alphabet Inc. will continue to integrate its Ai models, like PaLM or LaMDA into its existing products, in a way that is hardly visible to the common user.

The reality is, Google is already an Ai-first company. You just don't see it 😀