“Hear that cry?” asks Edwin Chen.

“It’s the whimper of 10,000 Googlers losing their onsite massages and mid-day volleyball games as Sundar whips his company into a Code Red.”

Uh-oh.

Google’s in trouble.

And, yes, it has everything to do with ChatGPT… but with a twist.

If you haven’t heard of ChatGPT, let me help you climb out of that cave.

Simply put, ChatGPT is a language model trained by AI, designed and directed by a small AI upstart called OpenAI.

Since it can speak for itself, here’s what it said… about itself:

“You can describe me as a computer program that is designed to assist users with tasks and answer their questions. I am a language model, which means that I have been trained on a large dataset of text and can generate human-like responses to user input. I do not have feelings or consciousness, but I am here to help you to the best of my ability.”

To which, I asked: “Will you ever have feelings?”

And it broke.

So it's Google but it responds like a human.

Naturally everyone’s wondering:

Is This the Google Killer?

Chen, who heads up the AI team at Surge,  wanted to see how ChatGPT measured up to Google when it came to general search.

So he and his team put ChatGPT to the test.

He asked everyone to look up their past three Google searches and then run those through ChatGPT.

They ran a total of 500.

The takeaway? ChatGPT tied with or was slightly better than Google, “despite not being optimized for a search experience at all.”

For example, if you ask Google how to make risotto, what do you get? You get a bunch of blog posts with a bunch of filler, ads, pop-ups, and branding.

On the other hand, ChatGPT will give you the exact recipe. No fluff. No wading through a bunch of crap.

“In many ways,” says Chen, “ChatGPT is the definition of the future of Search. What good is a superintelligent AI if it can’t tell me the weather, suggest an exciting new restaurant for me to try, and summarize Lionel Messi’s backstory? Understanding the vastness of the web used to be Google’s killer technology, and now a small upstart is threatening it.”

But maybe it’s not the small upstart that will eat Google’s lunch.

Microsoft: The Google Killer?

If you didn’t know: Microsoft takes AI VERY seriously.

For starters, the company released an open source tool -- called Counterfeit -- that lets organizations attack their AI software solutions and find flaws.

They understand cybersecurity is going to be THE big issue.

Also, it’s common knowledge that Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI. In fact, Microsoft’s $1B investment in OpenAI in 2019 might turn out to be its best ever.

Here’s why…

Bing it.

By the end of March, the company plans to roll out ChatGPT in its search engine Bing.

When that happens, Bing might become the next household verb.

“I’m going to Bing it.”

“Did you Bing it?”

“It’s true!  Bing it!”

Also, Microsoft plans to integrate the popular AI image creator DALL-E. So rather than searching for images, AI will create custom images for you. Straight from the search engine website.

Now, here’s why this is a big deal… and why it’s probably not priced in.

Far from a fledgling, Bing has more users than you might think. In 2021, it almost pulled in more ad revenue than Snapchat and Twitter combined.

And here’s another thing…

Microsoft stock just took a hit as the UBS Group downgraded the company because its subsidiary Azure grew way slower than expected.

Indeed…

This could offer an interesting short-term opportunity for investors looking for a relatively safe AI play.

More on this tomorrow.