Kelly Evans, Co-Host of CNBC's Power Lunch
David A. Grogan | CNBC
For the first time yesterday, when I went to Google (which I do less and less of anymore), it asked me if I wanted to switch over to AI mode. I figured sure, since I've been using its AI summaries anyhow, and it put me into what looked like a full-blown version of Gemini or ChatGPT. No ads. No blue links.
What this tells me is that the era of Google as we knew it is officially over. And I, for one, certainly do not mourn that. As great as the product was when it was first introduced, is as bad as it became towards the end. Good luck finding any really useful links buried beneath all of their ads. Smaller businesses were justifiably furious at having to pay to compete up top against the deep-pocketed big guys for traffic they were rightly owed.
The search engine, in other words, had become nowhere near as effective as it used to be. And while regulators drool at the opportunity to jump in and set rules and prosecute offenders and collect big fines, it's far better for society that monopolies are disrupted because they become less useful and leave an opening for better products to break through.
Enter ChatGPT.
Now, the irony here is twofold. One, after a few early missteps, Google has answered ChatGPT with its own excellent chatbot, Gemini, that we are using more and more of in our house. (If you want a chuckle, ask it to give you this job/personality test.) Shares of parent company Alphabet soared 65% last year, for the best performance of all the "Magnificent 7."
So while it's goodbye to Google as a search box, the company itself has pivoted nicely, and regulators can at least breathe somewhat easy that they have a formidable rival now, with ChatGPT's 900 million active weekly users.
Secondly, the real question is what happens to the entire internet ecosystem that once relied upon Google search traffic. I'm thinking of recipe bloggers, websites like Vice and Buzzfeed that once had hundreds of employees, and so forth. I'm not sure how much of the former internet economy realizes it's never coming back, and they will have to dream up entirely new business models.
I also expect the lawyers are salivating. The class action suits against chatbots that scraped the internet of content that people once made a living off of must surely be coming apace. News providers can survive and even thrive in a world where chatbots have to pay to maintain access to up-to-the-minute information for users, but someone who gave the internet their maple-glazed salmon recipe? Forget about it.
The business model for these AI companies, therefore, is not a total slam dunk. I wonder if they will become a bit like sports channels that have to pay up big for the rights to major league content.
Either way, it's off to the races. ChatGPT killed Google, and the only question is how much of the rest of the old internet economy will perish along with it.
See you at 1 p.m!
Kelly