The idea of Alphabet’s (GOOG:NASDAQ) Google search engine being disrupted seems far-fetched given its huge global market share.

But the conversation has been given more credence after Microsoft (MSFT:NASDAQ) announced a multi-year $10 billion investment in OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The deal comes less than two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT which has since gone viral. The company said it has trained a model capable of interacting in a conversational way, providing answers to follow-up questions and challenge incorrect premises.

OpenAI is a not-for-profit company founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman to develop AI in ways which benefit mankind as a whole.

The latest deal gives Microsoft preferential rights to commercialise OpenAI’s technology according to a Financial Times report. It also opens the prospect of the two tech giants going ‘head-to-head’ in the race to develop the next generation of internet search using natural language.

While Google won the ‘search wars’ decades ago and dominates the search landscape, Microsoft’s Bing search engine still generates billion of dollars in annual revenue.

Rather than spend money overhauling the engine Microsoft has said it plans to use OpenAI’s technology to find new ways of presenting information to its users while they are inside other applications and reducing the need to use a search engine.

WHY IS EVERYONE SO EXCITED BY CHATGPT?

ChatGPT is the first commercial technology which allows consumers to interact in a natural way with their computers by asking specific questions to identify what they need.

The technology doesn’t need to trawl across the internet for answers like a search engine is designed to do. Instead, it uses information studied from vast swathes of training data.

AI (artificial intelligence) researcher and economics professor Anton Korinek told CNET,  ‘ChatGPT can answer its users with a single clear response compared to the myriads links of traditional search engines.

‘It also has capabilities that are far beyond traditional search engines, like [the ability] to generate new text, explain concepts, have a back-and-forth conversation.’

This should be a worry for Google because it could eventually supplant traditional search engines.

WHAT IS GOOGLE DOING IN RESPONSE?

However, Alphabet claims it has developed a more powerful chatbot called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) which can similarly use natural language.

The dilemma for Alphabet is that its current search business is very profitable and finding a better solution would result in fewer searches argues former Google search executive Sridhar Ramaswamy.

The official Alphabet line for not releasing its own version of ChatGPT is related to potential social and ethical risks.

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