Kevin O’Leary remembers what a disruptive force Amazon was in the early 2000s. Fortunately, he was an early investor in the company. Now, he sees the same disruption happening in the search business with artificial intelligence and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“ChatGPT is definitely a threat to Google, and Google needs to know that,” he said Shark Tank star told Insider in an interview published this week. About half of the search queries themselves, he added, are now done through ChatGPT. The “loser is Google,” he said, adding, “the AI search war is.”
O’Leary said he’s now considering the opportunity to be an early investor in OpenAI, adding he’s “lucky to be offered a piece.” He attributed the value of the loss-making venture to “very, very extreme” – reportedly close to the $30 billion mark – due to the new technology, but said the deal would close in the near future.
If he invests, he told Insider, it will be a simple bet: “You will get a good result or not, but I will not take the boat or sell the farm. I know there will be a lot of competition and a lot of noise, but I am always happy have the first part.
They prefer the first mover, he added, because it has a marketing advantage.
OpenAI itself has been surprised by the amount of attention ChatGPT has generated.
“We didn’t expect this level of excitement from putting our children into this world,” OpenAI CTO Mira Murati said this month in a Time interview. “We, in fact, even have some trepidation about putting it out there.”
But as angel investor Elad Gil noted last month, ChatGPT’s rapid adoption despite its recent decline is a sign of product-market fit. The Google alum added that the idea can be implemented quickly, which he has repeatedly seen in companies he has worked for and invested in over the years. (Gil was an early investor in Airbnb, Instacart, and Square.)
Of course, OpenAI is currently suffering heavy losses, not to mention the huge computational cost of all the unwanted ChatGPT users. Microsoft’s big investment should help. And this week, the tech giant announced an update to its Bing search engine that integrates ChatGPT technology.
Earlier this month, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Plus, a $20 monthly subscription that provides faster response times and better access to chatbots when they’re down due to traffic.
After noting ChatGPT’s threat to Google, O’Leary told Insider, “The market has not yet punished Google’s stock for this. But a few quarters from now, if ChatGPT really starts to bring significant customer costs, then we will see what happens.
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