The point of contention

Microsoft Is Said to be Making a Very Bold Move Its Googles Worst Nightmare

The point of contention

Microsoft and Google are at it again. The point of contention, this time around, is related to the vulnerabilities in the Chrome web browser which the latter makes for PCs. Microsoft discovered a vulnerability in the Chrome web browser and has now made the details public in what it feels is a responsible disclosure. Microsoft’s security team has identified and detailed a remote code execution process in the Chrome browser running on Windows PCs and called out Google’s lax attitude towards patching that vulnerability.

Assuming reports of this partnership are true, this is very, very bad news for Google. Even before word of the Bing integration leaked out, Google’s upper management, presumably led by CEO Sundar Pichai, had reportedly called a “code red” over ChatGPT’s astonishingly fast growth in popularity since its release about six weeks ago. “Code red” reportedly signals an existential threat, and chatbots such as ChatGPT constitute such a threat to Google. As I discovered when I tried it myself, ChatGPT can be a faster and easier way to learn about something than a Google search. And Google search can’t do handy things like draft your marketing copy.

Needless to say, Google engineers are also pretty good at creating A.I., and the company has developed its chatbot, named LaMDA, that supposedly rivals ChatGPT. LaMDA became briefly famous last summer when a Google engineer publicly claimed it was sentient. Google says it isn’t, and the rest of us can’t check for ourselves because, unlike ChatGPT, LaMDA has never been widely released. Google likely won’t release it to the public anytime soon.

The real reason Google fears ChatGPT

But there’s another reason Google may hesitate to release its chatbot, and it’s a problem the company can’t easily solve. Google search is supported by advertising which makes up more than 80 percent of the company’s revenue. Thus, the goal of search–from Google’s point of view–is not to get you to the website you’re looking for as fast as possible. It’s to show you a list of possible websites, including some that have paid to be there and that you might choose to click on.