My, oh my. Google is fielding quite the number of challengers lately to its preeminence as the world’s primary means for accessing the internet world at large.
Each day, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is fielding 2.5 billion prompts, according to Axios. Once your eyes finish bugging out Tom & Jerry style, consider that some very basic math shows that Google’s claimed 5 trillion annual searches breaks down to an average of 13.7 billion daily searches.
But it’s big enough that it’s more than a fad, more than a fluke. And if Google isn’t worried, it should be.
this’ll be web 3.0, or some proto-version of it
Putting aside apps for a moment and their effect in reducing the traffic that navigates the internet through URL addresses and search bars, Google hasn’t really had any true challengers since it took over the world in the early 2000s.
Just consider the word Google as a verb. Who says search anymore? From time to time it pops up, but more often than not a person will say Google because it’s that dominant of a method by which to find information.
Google launched in late 1998, and by the first few years of the new Millennium, most people were already using “Google” as a verb. Now, we may be seeing the future of its replacement. If its ultimate usurper isn’t from one of these companies, then it’ll almost surely still be one of these technologies.
There’s the just-launched Comet browser by Perplexity AI that wishes to gobble up part of the Chrome (and by extension, Google search) user base.
It’s a very early attempt that’s not yet made a dent in Google’s dominance, although it’s a sneak peek at the path forward for the internet. Finally we know what Web 3.0 means: AI-assisted (or AI-run, if you’re a pessimist) internet navigation.
Far more ominous to Google is ChatGPT’s 2.5 billion daily prompts, because there’s absolutely no sign that it’s reached its peak usage. Generative AI is still a very immature product that hasn’t even approached market saturation.
Plus, there are more of them. ChatGPT is the one that’s launched itself into the lexicon as a household name, ever since it released to the public in November 2022. There’s also Perplexity and Anthropic’s Claude.
Google’s making an attempt to hold its ground and, seeing the future, get in on the type of technology that seems destined to replace (in large part, if not in whole) the Google search bar. Its Gemini AI isn’t bad, though I’d say that it falls behind these other AIs in terms of chatbot capabilities (ChatGPT and Claude) and research capability (Perplexity).
We’ve all seen the future. Even Google has been wedging AI summaries into its search results pages in a very limited fashion. But the question isn’t just who can get to full AI-assisted searching first. It’s a question of who’ll do it better and, as things often go, who has the deepest pockets.
The post People Send ChatGPT 2.5 Billion Prompts a Day. That’s Billion, With a B. appeared first on VICE.
