Google Threatened By OpenAI Amid Awaiting US Antitrust Regulation Decision

The era of Google search engine glory is starting to be threatened by ChatGPT (photo: dock. pexels(

JAKARTA - Google faces increasingly big threat from OpenAI led by Sam Altman, even as the company awaits a decision from antitrust regulators in Washington on how to balance competition in the internet search business.

The US decision on Monday 5 August which states that Google has built an illegal search monopoly is considered a major victory for regulators. However, the increase in the number of AI device users, including OpenAI's popular ChatGPT chatbot, has begun to erode Google's dominance, according to sources, investors, and analysts.

"I think for Google right now, AI is a much bigger problem than that ruling. AI is fundamentally changing the way search products work," said Arvind Jain, a former Google engineer who worked on products like Search for a decade.

Jain, who now runs a search company at the company level called Glean, said the impact of AI occurred directly compared to the impact of these decisions which were often postponed and took a long time to influence the market.

Google has long been synonymous with searches, controlling about 90% of global market share and generating about $175 billion in annual revenue from this business. Even Apple, which prefers to build all the software and most of the hardware on its devices, allows Google to become their default search engine for a large fee.

However, the days of preferential treatment for payments were over even before a series of antitrust court cases were resolved. In its bid with AI, Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT to future devices. Apple emphasizes that the deal is not exclusive and opens up opportunities to partner with Google as another partner.

A decision against Google will accelerate Apple's move towards an AI-based search service if Apple is forced to end a search deal with Google, according to analysts.

Microsoft-backed OpenAI last month announced a gradual launch of SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine with real-time access to information from the internet.

A former senior Google executive predicts, "AI will move faster than the DOJ's speed of taking action against Google. The entire monopoly will end, in other words, AI speed will take over the search."

Both former Google executives and many Wall Street analysts agree that Google has raw material needed to lead the AI sector, including a large language model to train its AI and search engines. However, the company's efforts appear to be scattered amid OpenAI's attacks that attract young users.

The popularity of Genratative AI surprised Google. Despite being the basic source of research behind this technology, Google did not release consumer products until after ChatGPT became the fastest growing consumer application in early 2023.

"The biggest threat to Google is probably Google itself - the key to AI adoption is trust, and Google's initial errors with Search Overviews show that Google engineers are more focused on fast launches than making sure the product works properly, as they try to keep up with OpenAI and others," said Rebecca Wettemann, CEO and principal analyst at research firm Valoir.

Wettemann refers to Google's AI Overviews, a new feature that uses AI to answer search questions that appear before the link. This feature was criticized for causing errors, including suggesting users to eat glue and saying Barack Obama is a Muslim. Google also reduced the use of the feature earlier this year.

Gil Luria, an analyst at DA Davidson, believes that regulatory surveillance and AI threats are interrelated. "Some reason DOJ is cracking down on Google's business practices is because the market is in a flux state right now and they want to make sure Google doesn't prolong its dominance."

While the antitrust ruling may not have had a major impact on Google, the ruling should open up a search market for more players, said Richard Socher, CEO and founder of AI search engine startup You.com and former chief scientist at Salesforce.

However, he added that ending Google's dominance in the search would be "very difficult."

"Nothing really leaves a big scratch on Google's dominance of search to date... we have to see if this will be the next domino to actually give consumers more choices, real choices.