Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya Predicts Biggest Loser in 2023 Amid Rise of Artificial Intelligence

Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya is predicting who will be the biggest loser in business markets this year amid the ascent of artificial intelligence.

In a new episode of the All-In podcast, Palihapitiya says that Google will suffer the most as artificial intelligence begins to make the Google search function less relevant.

He specifically references ChatGPT, the new AI-based chatbot that has risen to prominence since its release nearly two months ago.

“Let me tell you my biggest business loser. I think that the biggest potential business loser this year is Google Search as measured by pure profitability and engagement. I think it’s easier for me to see where the usage comes from as opposed to picking Open AI or ChatGPT in terms of where the usage goes to. The reason is, I think a lot of people don’t fully understand how machine learning and AI work. Just a 30 second primer: there’s two big buckets of work.

There’s what’s called ‘learning,’ which is how you learn how to make predictions, and then there’s what’s called ‘inference,’ which is when you type something into the search box, you get the answer.

The thing with learning and what ChatGPT is showing is that they have learned by crawling the entirety of the web. There are five or six other organizations that are capable of crawling the entire web, in terms of cost, in terms of compute, in terms of the quality of the transformers and the quality of the AI.

So I find it easier to predict the decay in the quality of Google search as that much better than everyone else than I find it is to predict who will win because I think that with enough time and money, Oracle, Microsoft, Google, the Chinese internet companies, can all compete…

I think consumers end up getting confused and will end up being able to get high quality search results from many places versus today, you would only think that Google is the only game in town, for most people.”

The venture capitalist says that Google may not lose its spot as the top search engine in the world, but that it could still lose a sizeable amount of usage as other sites arrive to the game.

“Google could lose 10 or 15% of usage to all these others sites, and that may not make any of those sites that relevant, but it will have a material [and] measurable impact to Google and Google’s profit.”

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