‘ChatGPT quite far from being a Google replacement,’ says investor Rehan Yar Khan

ChatGPT may be the biggest buzzword on the internet right now, but it comes with clauses. After all, machine-generated results are heavily dependent on what data is fed into the systems over a period of time.

Talking of ChatGPT’s limitations, Rehan Yar Khan, Managing Partner at Orios Venture Partners (an early-stage VC fund), said, “ChatGPT, which has all the buzz currently, may be a helpful tool but it's quite far from being a Google replacement.”

“Google has, over the years, through deep crawls and an algorithm fine-tuned over countless searches and results, perfected the art of great results right on top. Google also gets us the information not from itself but from a credible web page it is pointing to. Thus, the confidence in its results is high. ChatGPT, instead, provides an answer or a list but how does one ascertain the quality of the answer or list? There is no source it points to,” Khan explained in a post on LinkedIn.

ChatGPT, of course, has the potential to alter the content creation landscape, but when it comes to specialised and high-quality results, it might still have a long way to go. “Google has every opportunity to continue its dominance in information search as it already ‘knows’ the best sources. That ranking of top sources is hard… if it weren't, other search engines like Bing would have achieved the same quality by now,” according to Khan.

Interestingly, Bing (owned by Microsoft) has already integrated ChatGPT in its searches. Microsoft has also started sending out the first round of invites to users, urging them to test a ChatGPT-powered search engine.

But Khan reckons Google might still have an upper hand in his space. “If Google were to launch a ChatGPT clone, that would use information from Google's search engine to provide high-quality answers,” he added.

Google, in fact, launched its own version of ChatGPT earlier this month. “It’s a really exciting time to be working on these technologies as we translate deep research and breakthroughs into products that truly help people,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced.

But the tool is said to have made a ,factual error in its testing phase, as a result of which Alphabet shares tanked 9 per cent, wiping off over $100 billion from its market cap. Google employees have also claimed that the BardAI launch was “rushed” and “botched”.

Despite Google’s goof up, analysts reckon it’s too early to determine who will win the generative AI race this decade.