Is Google’s 20-year search dominance about to end?

谷歌長(zhǎng)達(dá)20年的搜索引擎霸主地位即將終結(jié)了嗎？

The rise of ChatGPT-like AI applications has profound implications for internet use

類似ChatGPT的人工智能應(yīng)用興起對(duì)互聯(lián)網(wǎng)的使用有著深遠(yuǎn)的影響

Near the bay in Mountain View, California, sits one of biggest profit pools in business history. The site is the home of Google, whose search engine has for the past two decades been humanity’s preferred front door Ito the internet—and?advertisers’?preferred front door to humanity.?Every second of every day, Google processes perhaps 100,000 web searches around the world—and, thanks to its “PageRank” algorithm, serves up uncannily relevant answers.?That has conferred onto Google verb status. It also adds up to billions of daily opportunities to sell ads that the searchers see alongside the results of their queries. The results’ accuracy keeps users coming back, and rivals at bay: all other search engines combined account for barely a tenth of daily searchers (see chart 1).

在加州山景城的海灣附近，坐落著商業(yè)史上最大的利潤(rùn)池之一。這里是谷歌的所在地，谷歌搜索引擎在過去的二十年里一直是人類首選的互聯(lián)網(wǎng)門戶，也是廣告商的首選。每一天每一秒，谷歌都會(huì)處理全球大約10萬次網(wǎng)絡(luò)搜索——并且，得益于其“PageRank”算法，谷歌能提供了不可思議的相關(guān)答案。這也讓“谷歌一下”成為搜索的代名詞。這也意味著谷歌每天有數(shù)十億的機(jī)會(huì)出售廣告，搜索者可以在搜索結(jié)果旁邊看到這些廣告。搜索結(jié)果的準(zhǔn)確性讓用戶成為回頭客，競(jìng)爭(zhēng)對(duì)手只能望而卻步：所有其他搜索引擎加起來只占每日搜索量的十分之一（見圖表1）。

Advertisers pay handsomely for access to Google’s users, not least because they are typically only charged when someone actually visits their website. The revenue of Google’s parent company, now called?Alphabet, has grown at an average annual rate of over 20% since 2011. In that period it has generated more than $300bn in cash after operating expenses (see chart 2), the bulk of it from search. Its market value has more than trebled, to $1.4trn, making it the world’s fourth-most-valuable public company.?Unlike Apple and Microsoft, its bigger middle-aged tech rivals, it has not felt the need to reinvent itself. ?Until now.

廣告商為將廣告投放給谷歌用戶，往往支付豐厚的費(fèi)用，尤其是因?yàn)樗麄兺ǔＶ辉谟腥苏嬲L問他們的網(wǎng)站時(shí)才被收費(fèi)。自2011年以來，谷歌母公司Alphabet的收入年均增長(zhǎng)超過20%。在此期間，扣除了運(yùn)營(yíng)費(fèi)用后，它產(chǎn)生超過3000億美元的現(xiàn)金（見圖表2），其中大部分來自搜索業(yè)務(wù)。公司市值增長(zhǎng)了兩倍多，達(dá)到1.4萬億美元，成為全球第四大市值上市公司。與蘋果和微軟這兩個(gè)規(guī)模更大的保守派科技競(jìng)爭(zhēng)對(duì)手不同，谷歌并不覺得有必要重塑自己。直到現(xiàn)在。

The reason for the soul-searching in Mountain View is?Chatgpt, an artificially intelligent chatbot designed by a startup called Openai.?Besides being able to have a human-like conversation, Chatgpt?and others like it?can draft equally human-seeming poems, history essays, computer code and just about anything else that people write down, paint, compose or sing.?ubs, a bank, reckons that since its launch in November Chatgpt?has gained around 100m monthly active users, a feat that had taken TikTok, the world’s fastest-growing social-media platform, nine months. Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, has called this sort of “generative”?ai?“as important as the?pc, as the internet”.

谷歌進(jìn)行自我反省的原因是ChatGPT，這是一家名為OpenAI初創(chuàng)公司設(shè)計(jì)的人工智能聊天機(jī)器人。除了能夠進(jìn)行近似人類的對(duì)話，ChatGPT和其他類似的軟件還可以起草同樣類人的詩歌、歷史論文、計(jì)算機(jī)代碼以及人們書寫、繪畫、作曲或演唱的任何東西。瑞士銀行估計(jì)，自去年11月推出以來，ChatGPT每月活躍用戶增加了約1億，這是TikTok(全球增長(zhǎng)最快的社交媒體平臺(tái))9個(gè)月來的成就。微軟聯(lián)合創(chuàng)始人比爾·蓋茨稱這種“生成性”人工智能“與個(gè)人電腦和互聯(lián)網(wǎng)一樣重要”。

To Eric Schmidt, who used to run Google, Chatgpt?is the “first broadly visible example” of what a human being’s?ai?friend might look like. To his former employer, it is the first broadly visible threat to Google’s search dominance. For Chatgpt?can also answer the sorts of questions that people might have asked Google.?And Chatgpt’s creator, Openai, has teamed up with Microsoft, which is covetously eyeing Google’s gleaming pool of profits.

對(duì)于曾經(jīng)運(yùn)營(yíng)谷歌的埃里克·施密特來說，ChatGPT是“第一個(gè)廣泛可見的例子”，展示了人類的人工智能朋友可能是什么樣子。對(duì)他的前雇主來說，這是對(duì)谷歌搜索主導(dǎo)地位的第一次顯而易見的威脅。因?yàn)镃hatGPT還可以回答人們可能會(huì)問谷歌的各種問題。ChatGPT的創(chuàng)建者OpenAI已經(jīng)與微軟合作，后者正貪婪地盯著谷歌閃閃發(fā)光的利潤(rùn)池。

On February 7th Microsoft, which recently announced an investment of $10bn in Openai, showed off how it plans to go after those profits. Results from Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, will now be accompanied by an ai-generated side box summarising pertinent information. Bing will also get its own chatbot based on Openai’s models. Microsoft executives showed off neat tricks, such as producing a shopping list based on a week of planned meals and creating a music-trivia quiz. “It is a new day in search,” declared Microsoft’s ceo, Satya Nadella. Baidu, which dominates search in China, where Google is banned, plans to launch its own ai-boosted search in March. In a pre-emptive response, and to steal some of Mr Nadella’s thunder, Alphabet has in recent days unveiled its own chatbot, Bard, and reportedly invested $400m in Anthropic, another generative-ai startup. On February 8th, while presenting some non-chatty ai search features, it confirmed that Bard will be integrated into search within weeks. Investors were unimpressed; Alphabet’s share price tumbled by 8% after the announcement.

2月7日，最近宣布向Openai投資100億美元的微軟展示了它計(jì)劃如何追求這些利潤(rùn)。來自微軟搜索引擎必應(yīng)的搜索結(jié)果現(xiàn)在將伴隨著一個(gè)人工智能生成的側(cè)框，用于總結(jié)相關(guān)信息。必應(yīng)也將基于OpenAI的模型獲得自己的聊天機(jī)器人。微軟的高管們展示了一些巧妙的技巧，比如根據(jù)一周的飲食計(jì)劃制作一份購(gòu)物清單，以及制作一個(gè)音樂問答游戲?！斑@是搜索引擎的革新，”微軟首席執(zhí)行官塞特亞·納德拉宣稱。在谷歌被禁的中國(guó)，主導(dǎo)搜索的百度計(jì)劃在3月份推出自己的人工智能搜索。作為先發(fā)制人的回應(yīng)，也為了搶納德拉的風(fēng)頭，Alphabet最近幾天推出了自己的聊天機(jī)器人Bard，據(jù)報(bào)道，還向另一家生成性人工智能初創(chuàng)公司Anthropic投資了4億美元。2月8日，在展示一些非聊天型的人工智能搜索功能的同時(shí)，谷歌證實(shí)Bard將在幾周內(nèi)集成到搜索中。投資者不為所動(dòng)；聲明發(fā)布后，Alphabet的股價(jià)暴跌了8%。

The battle of the bots is, then, brewing. It will transform the way people find things on the internet.?In doing so, it may upend the lucrative business of search.

互聯(lián)網(wǎng)大廠的人工智能之戰(zhàn)正在醞釀之中。它將改變?nèi)藗冊(cè)诨ヂ?lián)網(wǎng)上找東西的方式。這樣做可能會(huì)顛覆利潤(rùn)豐厚的搜索業(yè)務(wù)。

The last time online search was disrupted was at the dawn of the consumer internet in the late 1990s. As the number of webpages grew into the millions, useful information became harder to find. A number of search engines, such as AltaVista and Yahoo!, made things a bit easier. But it was Google, founded in 1998, that revolutionised the industry. Its algorithm ranked webpages based on the number of other websites linking to them, which turned out to be a good proxy for relevance. Soon after, Google worked out that it could display ads related to users’ search keywords alongside the results.

上一次在線搜索收到?jīng)_擊是在20世紀(jì)90年代末消費(fèi)者互聯(lián)網(wǎng)出現(xiàn)的時(shí)候。隨著網(wǎng)頁的數(shù)量增長(zhǎng)到數(shù)百萬，有用的信息變得更難找到。一些搜索引擎，如AltaVista和雅虎，讓事情變得簡(jiǎn)單了一些。但是，是成立于1998年的谷歌徹底改變了這個(gè)行業(yè)。谷歌運(yùn)用的算法根據(jù)鏈接到網(wǎng)頁的其他網(wǎng)站數(shù)量對(duì)網(wǎng)頁進(jìn)行排名，這被證明是相關(guān)性的優(yōu)秀運(yùn)用案例。不久之后，谷歌發(fā)現(xiàn)它可以在搜索結(jié)果旁邊顯示與用戶搜索關(guān)鍵詞相關(guān)的廣告。

In the past few years challengers have tried to take on Google. Some are startups offering ad-free subscription search for consumers, such as Neeva and You.com. And Alphabet’s big-tech rivals are getting in on the action. Amazon, which has become the place where many shoppers start looking for products, has seen its share of the American search market jump from 3% in 2016 to 23% today. Apple’s ads business, consisting of searches for apps on iPhones, has gone from nothing a few years ago to 7%.?Google’s own research shows that two-fifths of 18-to-24-year olds favour Instagram, Meta’s photo-sharing app, or TikTok over Google Maps when searching for a nearby restaurant.

在過去的幾年里，挑戰(zhàn)者們?cè)噲D挑戰(zhàn)谷歌。一些初創(chuàng)公司為消費(fèi)者提供無廣告的訂閱搜索，如Neeva和You.com。Alphabet的大型科技競(jìng)爭(zhēng)對(duì)手也加入了進(jìn)來。亞馬遜已經(jīng)成為許多購(gòu)物者開始尋找產(chǎn)品的地方，其在美國(guó)搜索市場(chǎng)的份額從2016年的3%躍升至今天的23%。蘋果的廣告業(yè)務(wù)，包括在iPhone上搜索應(yīng)用程序，已經(jīng)從幾年前的零增長(zhǎng)到7%。谷歌自己的研究顯示，在搜索附近的餐館時(shí)，五分之二的18至24歲年輕人更喜歡Instagram、Meta的照片分享應(yīng)用程序或抖音，而不是谷歌地圖。

As a result of this ferment, Google’s share of revenue from search advertising in America will fall to 54% this year, down from 67% in 2016, according to eMarketer, a research firm. But these challengers never presented an existential threat to Google. The same cannot be said of chatbot-assisted conversational search. After Chatgpt’s launch Mr Pichai reportedly declared a “code red” at his company.

根據(jù)研究公司eMarketer的數(shù)據(jù)，由于這種動(dòng)蕩，谷歌在美國(guó)搜索廣告收入中的份額將從2016年的67%下降到今年的54%。但這些挑戰(zhàn)者從未對(duì)谷歌構(gòu)成生存威脅。聊天機(jī)器人輔助的對(duì)話搜索就不一樣了。據(jù)報(bào)道，在ChatGPT推出后，皮查伊先生宣布他的公司進(jìn)入“紅色警報(bào)”。

To understand why Google fears the chatbot and its copycats, first consider the technology behind them. Chatgpt works by predicting the next word in a sentence that is a response to some query. These predictions are based on a “l(fā)arge language model”, itself the result of prior analysis of millions of texts, harvested from the internet. Once trained on this giant corpus of natural language, the chatbot can, when prompted by users’ instructions, produce a fluently written answer rather than merely serving up a list of links.

要理解谷歌為什么害怕聊天機(jī)器人及其模仿者，首先要考慮它們背后的技術(shù)。ChatGPT的工作原理是預(yù)測(cè)句子中的下一個(gè)單詞，該單詞是對(duì)某個(gè)查詢的響應(yīng)。這些預(yù)測(cè)是基于一個(gè)“大型語言模型”，這個(gè)模型本身是對(duì)從互聯(lián)網(wǎng)上收集的數(shù)百萬文本進(jìn)行事先分析的結(jié)果。一旦在這個(gè)龐大的自然語言語料庫上接受訓(xùn)練，聊天機(jī)器人就可以在用戶指令的提示下，產(chǎn)生流利的書面答案，而不僅僅是提供一系列鏈接。

Applied to search queries, this means that responses could in principle contain many more variables. Want to go on a day trip somewhere off the beaten track that is cheap, child-friendly and educational? Unless you chance upon a travel blogpost, today finding a precise answer on Google (or Bing or Baidu) requires comparing dozens of websites and skim-reading tonnes of text. By contrast, Chatgpt?spits out a list of decent options in moments. Users can then add extra considerations or ask for more information with follow-up queries.

應(yīng)用于搜索查詢，這意味著響應(yīng)原則上可以包含更多的變量。想去一個(gè)便宜、適合兒童且有教育意義的人跡罕至的地方進(jìn)行一日游嗎？除非你偶然發(fā)現(xiàn)一篇旅游博客，否則今天在谷歌（或必應(yīng)或百度）上找到一個(gè)準(zhǔn)確的答案需要比較幾十個(gè)網(wǎng)站和瀏覽大量文本。相比之下，ChatGPT很快就會(huì)列出一系列不錯(cuò)的選擇。然后，用戶可以添加額外的考慮因素，或者通過后續(xù)查詢?cè)儐柛嘈畔ⅰ?/p>

Changing how people search will, in turn, change what they search for. As well as seeking existing information, users can use conversational search to generate completely original content. Chatgpt?writes poetry and essays—in the style of your favourite author, if you wish. On January 26th Google published a paper describing Musiclm, a new large language model that can make music from text.?GitHub, a Microsoft-owned platform which hosts open-source programs, has a chatbot called Copilot that can churn out lines of code. That opens up all-new search-adjacent markets, argues Mark Shmulik of Bernstein, a broker, most immediately in productivity tools for businesses (like helping desk jockeys write presentations).

改變?nèi)藗兊乃阉鞣绞椒催^來會(huì)改變他們搜索的內(nèi)容。除了尋找現(xiàn)有的信息，用戶還可以使用對(duì)話式搜索來生成完全原創(chuàng)的內(nèi)容。ChatGPT寫詩歌和散文——如果你愿意，可以用你最喜歡的作家的風(fēng)格。1月26日，谷歌發(fā)表了一篇描述Musiclm的論文，這是一種新的大型語言模型，可以從文本中制作音樂。微軟旗下托管開源程序的平臺(tái)GitHub有一個(gè)名為Copilot的聊天機(jī)器人，可以大量生成代碼行。伯恩斯坦研究公司的經(jīng)紀(jì)人馬克·什穆里克認(rèn)為，這打開了全新的搜索市場(chǎng)，最直接的觀點(diǎn)是企業(yè)生產(chǎn)力工具（比如幫助辦公桌工作人員寫演示文稿）。

A little more conversation…

再聊一會(huì)兒……

As a new area, conversational search is attracting hopeful newcomers, buoyed by the prospect of an expanding market for search and generative content. “When I started two years ago, people said I was crazy. Now the sentiment has massively shifted,” says Richard Socher, founder of You.com, which also offers an embedded ai-powered chatbot. Neeva has also added a chatbot to its subscription search. Sridhar Ramaswamy, its co-founder, hopes this will help it reach 5m-10m subscribers, up from almost 2m today (not all of them paying subscribers), and become financially self-sustaining. c3.ai, a business-software firm, has begun offering a chatbot to help companies search their in-house data. Travel companies, including Booking.com, are toying with chatbots, too.

作為一個(gè)新領(lǐng)域，受到搜索和生成內(nèi)容市場(chǎng)不斷擴(kuò)大的前景鼓舞，對(duì)話式搜索正在吸引有希望的新來者?！爱?dāng)我兩年前開始的時(shí)候，人們說我瘋了。現(xiàn)在這種情緒已經(jīng)發(fā)生了巨大的變化，”You.com的創(chuàng)始人理查德·索徹說，該公司也提供嵌入式人工智能聊天機(jī)器人。Neeva還在其訂閱搜索中添加了一個(gè)聊天機(jī)器人。其聯(lián)合創(chuàng)始人斯里達(dá)爾·拉馬斯瓦米希望這將幫助其達(dá)到500萬至1000萬活躍用戶，而目前只有近200萬用戶（并非所有用戶都是付費(fèi)用戶），并實(shí)現(xiàn)財(cái)務(wù)自給自足。商業(yè)軟件公司c3.ai已經(jīng)開始提供聊天機(jī)器人來幫助公司搜索他們的內(nèi)部數(shù)據(jù)。包括Booking.com在內(nèi)的旅游公司也在調(diào)制聊天機(jī)器人。

The most serious threat comes from Microsoft. Its big advantage is that it already has the search infrastructure, including oodles of computing power, storage systems and armies of web-crawling programs that constantly scrape information from the internet. Setting all this up from scratch to compete with Google would, according to one estimate by the Competition Markets Authority, a British trustbusting agency, cost between $10bn and $30bn.

最嚴(yán)重的威脅來自微軟。最大優(yōu)勢(shì)是它已經(jīng)擁有了搜索基礎(chǔ)設(shè)施，包括大量的計(jì)算能力、存儲(chǔ)系統(tǒng)和大量不斷從互聯(lián)網(wǎng)上抓取信息的網(wǎng)絡(luò)抓取程序。根據(jù)英國(guó)反信任機(jī)構(gòu)競(jìng)爭(zhēng)市場(chǎng)管理局的一項(xiàng)估計(jì)，從零開始建立這一切以與谷歌競(jìng)爭(zhēng)，將花費(fèi)100億至300億美元。

At present Bing’s share of America’s search-advertising market is a measly 5% (see chart 3). Microsoft hopes that Bing’s new bag of tricks will change that. Importantly, the company seems to have solved some of Chatgpt’s shortcomings. One was keeping the bot up to date. Chatgpt’s underlying?ai, called?gpt-3.5, has been trained on data from 2021 and thus has no knowledge of anything on the internet after that point. Ask Chatgpt?about recent news or today’s weather forecast and you get an apology. Bing’s?ai, by contrast, decides how to gather the most relevant information and then uses search tools to find it. The data are then fed back into the model, which uses them to compose a fluent answer. Other firms, including Neeva, are using this method, too.

目前，必應(yīng)在美國(guó)搜索廣告市場(chǎng)的份額只有區(qū)區(qū)5%（見圖表3）。微軟希望必應(yīng)的新錦囊妙計(jì)能改變這種狀況。重要的是，該公司似乎已經(jīng)解決了ChatGPT的一些缺點(diǎn)。一個(gè)是讓機(jī)器人保持最新。ChatGPT的底層人工智能名為gpt-3.5，已經(jīng)根據(jù)2021年的數(shù)據(jù)進(jìn)行了訓(xùn)練，它在那之后對(duì)互聯(lián)網(wǎng)上的任何事情都一無所知。向ChatGPT詢問最近的新聞或今天的天氣預(yù)報(bào)，他會(huì)給你道歉。相比之下，必應(yīng)的人工智能將決定如何收集最相關(guān)的信息，然后使用搜索工具找到它。然后，這些數(shù)據(jù)被反饋到模型中，模型使用這些數(shù)據(jù)來組成一個(gè)流暢的答案。包括Neeva在內(nèi)的其他公司也在使用這種方法。

This in turn has helped Microsoft tackle a bigger technological problem: large language models’ tendency to make stuff up. Chatbots have no sense of what is true or false; they reflect what is on the internet, warts and all. These authorititive-sounding “hallucinations”, in computer-science speak, are innocuous when the chatbot is used for fun and games. When it is meant to give real answers to serious questions, they are a fatal flaw. Last year Meta had to take down its science chatbot, Galactica, after it was found to be spouting scientific nonsense.

這反過來幫助微軟解決了一個(gè)更大的技術(shù)問題：大型語言模型傾向于編造東西。聊天機(jī)器人對(duì)于真假?zèng)]有感覺；它們反映了互聯(lián)網(wǎng)上的內(nèi)容，包括其中所有的缺點(diǎn)。用計(jì)算機(jī)科學(xué)的話說，當(dāng)聊天機(jī)器人被用于娛樂和游戲時(shí)，這些聽起來很權(quán)威的“幻覺”是無害的。當(dāng)打算對(duì)嚴(yán)肅的問題給出真正的答案時(shí)，它們會(huì)帶來致命的缺陷。去年，Meta不得不關(guān)閉它的科學(xué)聊天機(jī)器人Galactica，因?yàn)樗鼘覍以诤f八道。

Giving the model access to up-to-date data has reduced, though not eliminated, the hallucinations rate for Bing’s chat feature. “A lot of the hallucinations were [the model] trying to fill in the blanks on things that had happened since the end of its training data,” explains Kevin Scott, Microsoft chief technology officer. He adds that his firm is using other techniques to lower the rate further. These include having humans tell the models which answers are better and what information is reliable; adding memory to the systems, so that the algorithms could learn from the conversations, which they currently do not; and posting links to sources in the ai-generated responses. Mr Schmidt similarly expects chatbots to be completely sober within a year or two.

讓模型訪問最新數(shù)據(jù)降低了必應(yīng)聊天功能的幻覺率，盡管沒有完全消除。微軟首席技術(shù)官凱文·斯科特解釋說：“很多幻覺都是模型試圖填補(bǔ)自訓(xùn)練數(shù)據(jù)結(jié)束以來發(fā)生的事情的空白?！彼a(bǔ)充說，他的公司正在使用其他技術(shù)來進(jìn)一步降低幻覺率。這些包括讓人類告訴模型哪些答案更好，哪些信息是可靠的；給系統(tǒng)增加內(nèi)存，這樣算法就可以從對(duì)話中學(xué)習(xí)，而目前還沒有；并在人工智能生成的響應(yīng)中發(fā)布鏈接。施密特同樣預(yù)計(jì)聊天機(jī)器人將在一兩年內(nèi)完全清醒。

Solving the technological problems is only the first step to dislodging Google from the search pedestal. No less knotty is working out how conversational search will make money. Start with the costs, which for chatbots remain high compared with conventional search. Brian Nowak of Morgan Stanley, a bank, estimates that serving up an answer to a Chatgpt query costs roughly two cents, about seven times more than a Google search, because of the extra computing power required. He reckons that every 10% of Google searches that shift to an ai-powered application by 2025 will, depending on the number of words in an average response, add between $700m and $11.6bn, to Google’s operating costs, equivalent to between 1% and 14% of such spending in 2022.

解決技術(shù)問題只是將谷歌從搜索引擎王座上趕下來的第一步。同樣棘手的是研究對(duì)話式搜索如何賺錢。首先是成本，與傳統(tǒng)搜索相比，聊天機(jī)器人的成本仍然很高。摩根士丹利銀行的布萊恩·諾瓦克估計(jì)，由于需要額外的算力，提供一個(gè)ChatGPT查詢的答案大約需要2美分，大約是谷歌搜索的7倍。他估計(jì)，到2025年，每10%的谷歌搜索轉(zhuǎn)向人工智能應(yīng)用，根據(jù)平均回復(fù)中的字?jǐn)?shù)，將為谷歌增加7億至116億美元的運(yùn)營(yíng)成本，相當(dāng)于2022年支出的1%至14%。

To complicate matters further, many costly conversational-search queries will generate little or no ad revenue. Google has said that 80% of its search results do not contain lucrative ads at the top of the search results. Many of these ad-light searches are almost certainly “informational” (“what is the capital of Spain?”), precisely the sort of query where chatbots are most useful—and precisely the sort that advertisers are least interested in (it is hard to know what ad to place next to the word “Madrid”). For generative ai to make real money, it will need to find uses in “navigational” searches (looking for a site’s internet address by its name) and especially “commercial” ones (“Best new ski boots this season”).

更復(fù)雜的是，許多昂貴的對(duì)話式搜索查詢將帶來很少或壓根沒有廣告收入。谷歌表示，其80%的搜索結(jié)果中，頂部并不包含利潤(rùn)豐厚的廣告。這些輕廣告搜索中有許多幾乎可以肯定是“信息性的”（“西班牙的首都是哪里？”），這正是聊天機(jī)器人最有用的查詢，也正是廣告商最不感興趣的（很難想出要在“馬德里”這個(gè)詞旁邊放什么廣告）。為了讓生成性人工智能真正賺錢，它需要在“導(dǎo)航”搜索（通過名稱尋找網(wǎng)站的互聯(lián)網(wǎng)地址）中找到用途，尤其是“商業(yè)”搜索（“本季最佳新滑雪靴”）。

Some companies, such as Neeva, earn revenue from subscriptions. On February 1st Openai?began signing up subscribers to the current version of Chatgpt. For $20 a month users get faster responses and access during peak times. Openai?also plans to license the technology directly to other firms. But the big bucks are likely to lie in advertising.

一些公司，如Neeva，從訂閱中獲得收入。2月1日，Openai開始注冊(cè)當(dāng)前版本的ChatGPT用戶。每月20美元，用戶可以在高峰時(shí)段獲得更快的響應(yīng)和訪問。Openai還計(jì)劃將這項(xiàng)技術(shù)直接授權(quán)給其他公司。但是賺大錢的是廣告。

Embedding ads in what is meant to feel to a user like a normal conversation will require deftness. One possibility is to display fewer adverts but charge advertisers more for each, says Mr Nowak. A chatbot is likely to offer up only a few suggestions in response to a search query about, say, blissful Hawaiian hotels. Hoteliers may be happy to pay more to ensure that theirs are among those suggestions, or displayed next to them. Microsoft says that it plans to test such a model in the new-look Bing.

將廣告嵌入到讓用戶感覺像正常對(duì)話的內(nèi)容中需要技巧。諾瓦克先生說，一種可能性是展示更少的廣告，但向廣告商收取更多的費(fèi)用。一個(gè)聊天機(jī)器人很可能只提供一些建議來回應(yīng)一個(gè)搜索查詢，比如說，夏威夷的幸福酒店。酒店經(jīng)營(yíng)者可能很樂意支付更多的錢，以確保他們能出現(xiàn)在這些建議中，或者顯示在問答框旁邊。微軟計(jì)劃在新外觀的必應(yīng)中測(cè)試這種模式。

Microsoft may be betting that its chatbot-assisted informational search will lure more users, who will then use Bing for the more lucrative queries as well. This would almost certainly mean sacrificing margins, at least until costs can be brought down. It would only be worth it if they can wrest sizeable market share from Google. Microsoft expects that for every percentage point of market share they gain in search, its annual advertising revenue will grow by $2bn.

微軟可能押注于其聊天機(jī)器人輔助的信息搜索將吸引更多用戶，這些用戶也將使用必應(yīng)進(jìn)行更有利可圖的查詢。這幾乎肯定意味著犧牲利潤(rùn)，至少在成本降低之前是如此。只有當(dāng)他們能從谷歌手中奪取相當(dāng)大的市場(chǎng)份額時(shí)，這才是值得的。微軟預(yù)計(jì)，他們?cè)谒阉黝I(lǐng)域每獲得一個(gè)百分點(diǎn)的市場(chǎng)份額，其年度廣告收入將增長(zhǎng)20億美元。

That is possible—but not guaranteed. Alphabet retains some formidable strengths. One is technology. Although Google has yet to integrate generative ai into its search engine, it has been deploying other ais in its search business for years. When it highlights a web-page snippet at the top of the search results, that is courtesy of models such as Bert and Mum. Its new generative ai, Bard, is likely to be no less impressive than Chatgpt. The reason the company has given for its foot-dragging is fear about unleashing a chatbot that spewed controversial content.

這是可能的，但不能保證。Alphabet保留了一些強(qiáng)大的優(yōu)勢(shì)。一個(gè)是技術(shù)。盡管谷歌尚未將生成式人工智能集成到其搜索引擎中，但多年來，它一直在搜索業(yè)務(wù)中部署其他人工智能。當(dāng)它在搜索結(jié)果頂部突出顯示一個(gè)網(wǎng)頁片段時(shí)，這得益于Bert和Mum等模型。谷歌的新生成人工智能Bard模型可能不會(huì)比ChatGPT更令人印象深刻。該公司之所以發(fā)布的如此扭扭捏捏，是因?yàn)閾?dān)心該聊天機(jī)器人會(huì)有爭(zhēng)議內(nèi)容。