Are People Losing Faith in AI?

When ChatGPT launched three years ago, it was immediately assumed to be Google’s successor. Analyst firm Gartner and others made aggressive, ill-fated predictions about Google's inevitable decline, in the face of the company's first real competition in years. 

While the "Google is toast" thesis might have been plausible in the early days of generative AI/ChatGPT, it has turned out to be spectacularly wrong. Despite ChatGPT’s impressive growth – now 800 million weekly users – Google has been able to maintain and even grow its search volumes.

The fruits of Google's continued strength were on full display this past week as the company posted its first $100 billion quarter ($102.3 billion), roughly 84% of which was advertising revenue. However, Google CEO Sundar Pichai largely attributed the company’s growth to AI.  

Google's revenue is driven in large part by its search and ad tech monopolies. And the company is using its massive ad revenues and distribution (Search, Android, Workplace, Chrome) to elevate Gemini in the battle against ChatGPT. Google's executives have also held out its various structured databases (“graphs”) as a defense against hallucination and a reason consumers should have greater trust in its AI answers and outputs.