In the last few weeks, the newest internet craze seems to be OpenAI, with everyone from industry experts to high school history teachers having something to say about it. So today on The Old and the New, I will be covering the internet's favorite topic, AI, and how one of the world’s biggest tech giants just can't seem to keep up with it. 
For some context, in 2016, the CEO of Google proclaimed that Google would be an “AI-first” company. 
This hasn’t worked out very well, however. As a Forbes article put it, Google has been “beaten to market in a field it should have dominated”. 
OpenAI’s ChatGPT is not the first of its kind. Google announced a similar technology called LaMDA two years ago. Yet LaMDA was unable to captivate the Internet quite like ChatGPT has done. 
And it's not just that. Microsoft recently announced that the next version of Bing will be powered by OpenAI technology. With this partnership, Microsoft is hoping to take on Google search which had been virtually untouchable until now. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, described it as being “all about rethinking the largest software category there is.” 
“It's a platform shift,” he added. 
This announcement was made a day after Google released Bard — a release that many speculate to have been rushed. Bard is a “much smaller” version of LaMDA technology. Bard will have a wide release in the “coming weeks”, according to Google. 
But critics say this is not enough. 
As Forbes put it, “while the upstarts have a healthy respect for Google, they no longer fear it.” This is just another example of a broader cultural shift. “The race starts today,” the CEO of Microsoft said in a press release. “We're going to move fast and for us, every day we want to bring out new things.” 
Microsoft isn’t the only challenger looking to take down Google. A former Google employee who left the company to found their own AI startup said “The pirates have their boats in the ocean, and we are coming.”
It seems Google needs to protect its foothold in the search category, and for this, Google desperately needs to stop playing catch-up in the AI market. 
“But to take back its AI mantle, Google may have to change the very nature of what it means to ‘google’ something.” Wrote a Forbes article. 
With the emergence of the chatbot, the way people search is expected to change, especially for responses that could contain many variables. For example, if someone is searching for places to go on a day trip, finding a good answer on Google requires comparing dozens of websites and reading lots of text. However, using ChatGPT, the user can get a list of options in moments. The user can then ask follow-up queries to get more information. 
It's uncertain if Google will be able to create an AI product to re-establish its influence in the industry. As Silicon Valley PR leader Brooke Hammerling put it, “there’s PTSD.” She was referring to the major public backlash Google has faced with its previous AI product, Duplex. 
Margaret Mitchell, one of Google’s Ethical AI leads said “It’s very clear that Google was [once] on a path where it could have potentially dominated the kinds of conversations we're having now with ChatGPT.” Mitchell also addressed the company’s outlook, “The fact that the decisions made earlier were very shortsighted put it in a place now where there's so much concern about any kind of pushback.”
While Google is reportedly planning to “recalibrate” the amount of risk it's willing to take in its AI technology releases, OpenAI's CEO has said the opposite for his company in a subtweet. “OpenAI will continually decrease the level of risk we are comfortable taking with new models as they get more powerful,” he wrote. “Not the other way around.”

That's it for today, thank you for listening to The Old and the New podcast. See you next episode.