> Why are they in a panic over ChatGpt?

The NYTimes and the rest of the media misread between the lines on this story.

Google aren't worried about competition. They are worried about losing the war with SEO.

ChatGPT showed them a glimpse of the SEO endgame. It upsets the balance between search ranking/boosting and SEO. Whatever adaptations they put into their boosting algo, GPT-style AI can eventually learn. Once learned, it can be subverted.

Fundamentally search boosting is at a disadvantage, because SEO has (blackbox) access to the boosting algo by feeding content to the crawlers and running searches. However the booster doesn't have access to the SEO algo; in fact it doesn't even know (beyond a guess) how many discrete SEO algos it is fighting, or which sites are optimized by which algos. So there is great asymmetry there.

That is why the fire alarm was pulled.

Something I find very curious - Google are doing the same kind of research and are in many ways futher along. They have thier own models like T5 that supposedly perform better. Are their exec unaware of their own strengths?

For that matter, wasn't Google collecting masses of GIS data and doing intense self driving car research? Where is that product?

Serious q - do google have so much money that they are doing tons of research and then just forgetting to make a product out of it?

80% of their revenue comes from ads, which is google search. Chatgpt and any other startup who invests in something like chatgpt can upend googles core business model.

and no, google doesn’t have anything significant in this space. “Innovation” behind search was to slowly increase no. if paid ads in your results, driven by need to increase revenue and keep the rest of the 80% of biz afloat.