Imagine having a computer without the internet? I can't, but back in the day when the computer was released in the market in 1945 internet was unheard of. Until 1983 people used computers for complex computations and decrypting only. Decrypting looks like those world war movies scenes that had computer machines huge enough to fill up rooms with beeping control switches that they used to decode military codes and radio signals. When world war was hot on its heels and the USA Defense department needed a way to virtually access information from enemy lines computers. They invented a network (universal language) for computers to communicate with each other called Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), which was later called Transfer Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol (TCP/IP) that is in use to date. Searching for documents or files on the internet was however a painstaking experience until Tim Berners-Lee created the world wide web (www) an information system that enabled access to web pages through web browsers. This created a niche for search engine companies to thrive. Browers Before Google (BG) were completely phased out by the tech leader Google when the company came to play in 1998. Today, Google has a dominating market share of a whopping 84% while rivals Microsoft has 9% and Yahoo has 2.6% according to Statista 2022.
Tim's www genius idea was to have web servers (computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP/HTTPS) that could be accessed by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). A URL is made up of :
The URLs located your information on a web page which is formatted by a Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). This is the language of the webpage that allows for the embedding of links (hyperlinks) from other web pages. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the network the web uses to transfer information through the internet. Therefore, clicking on these links to find what you are looking for is called web surfing.
Is Google not Googling?
The tech giant Google has gradually been losing its grip in the market, as platforms like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Tiktok etc want a slice of the market share, googling has become not so obvious. To access the information you have to have an account on these platforms, so are we slowly entering the AG (after Google) days? I think it may take a while to bring this giant down.
So, computers solved the problem of computing, then the internet solved the problem of connecting computers, and search engines solved the problem of locating information on the internet. Now, artificial intelligence is using the information on the internet to create more information. Is it solving any problem? I think it is a complementary tool more than anything.
The AI Race
Earlier this month Microsoft announced their Open AI-run chatbot to be incorporated into their search engine Bing. Following the success of annexing AI to its product- Office Suite, I presume and of course the millions of investments in the company Open AI. Microsoft is rumoured to be using the yet-to-be-released GPT 4 language model. Fastward to this week, when the chatbot started to give bizarre responses from threatening to exact revenge and giving itself a codename Sidney to convincing a journalist to leave his wife. I can't wait to try it out myself and have a user opinion luckily, I'm on the waiting list for the Beta trials and can't wait to give my feedback.
On the other hand, to preempt Microsoft news Google rushed to announce its own AI chatbot demonstration a day before Microsoft. During their first demo, however, the bot run on the LaMBDA2 language cost its parent company Alphabet $100 billion. After experts noted the chatbot named Bard produced unfactual responses plummeting down the shares. What an expensive mistake!!
Did ChatGPT shake the dominance of search engine giants? Did Google fall behind in the AI race, is Microsoft following the lead? Experts from both tech companies and externally have warned of the limitations of using Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT due to the risk of machine hallucinations, sentient habits and 'going off the rails' tendencies. There may be more hiccups along the way but the future of AI is here and as Microsoft says the more people use it the more they discover its limitations and are able to use this feedback in their internal testing, I agree.
In the race of incorporating this innovation in their applications and search engines, Microsoft and Open AI seem to be more prepared than Google and Sam Altman Open AI CEO said they are pretty excited in the upcoming battle of who does what with AI and dominates the market.
The tech giant Google, has eased our way of using the internet for so many years that we forget we are slowly moving towards AG? (After Google). It will take some time to try and surpass Google’s sensation but what's next with AI? Google is your friend-may just get old!
The future of AI has begun and competition between the search engine giants seems to be brewing once again after Microsoft and Google's 6-year pact ended in April 2021. One thing that is clear is every IT business is cooking AI recipes and am all here for it! Check out my recent article on ChatGPT here.