Kevin O’Leary recalls Amazon’s revolutionary impact in the early 2000s. He struck it rich by getting in on the ground floor of the company. Now, with the help of AI and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, he predicts a similar shakeup in the search industry.
“ChatGPT certainly is a threat to Google, and Google must know that,” the Shark Tank star said in an interview published this week by Insider. He also mentioned that ChatGPT accounts for roughly half of his own search queries. According to him, “the AI search wars are on,” and the “loser is Google.”
O’Leary said he is currently considering an offer to invest in OpenAI early on, calling himself “fortunate to be offered a piece of it.” Given how new the technology is, he thinks that the price being asked for a business that is losing money is “very, very high,” but he predicted that a deal would be made soon.
He told Insider that he would not risk everything on a possible investment, saying instead, “Either it will have a good outcome or it won’t, but I won’t take down the ship or sell the farm for it.” I anticipate lots of rivalry and upheaval, but I want to ensure that I always hold some of the pioneering pie.
OpenAI’s advantage
He also said that he likes pioneers because they have an advantage in the marketplace.
Even OpenAI has been taken aback by the fervor surrounding ChatGPT.
OpenAI CTO Mira Murati told Time this month, “We weren’t anticipating this level of excitement from putting our child in the world.” “We were nervous about making it public at first.”
Even though ChatGPT is frequently unavailable, its rapid adoption is indicative of product-market fit, as angel investor Elad Gil pointed out last month. The ex-Googler continued by saying that in his experience both working for and investing in various businesses, he has found that when an idea works, it tends to work very quickly. (Gil made early investments in Airbnb, Instacart, and Square.)
The unexpected popularity of ChatGPT has resulted in massive computing costs for OpenAI, in addition to its current loss-making status. Investments on Microsoft’s scale should facilitate this. This week, Microsoft also introduced a new version of Bing that includes ChatGPT technology.
This month, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Plus, a monthly subscription service that costs $20 and grants users priority access to the chatbot during peak traffic times and faster response times overall.
O’Leary told Insider, “The market hasn’t really punished Google stock for this,” after noting the ChatGPT threat to Google. But if ChatGPT starts to bring in a lot of money from subscribers in the next few quarters, we will look into it.
