Google is a pay to play search engine. If somebody pays, their result goes to the top.

Google will kill its own golden goose unless they can develop an AI that feeds out your question to a real time market and gives the answer that the highest bidder pays for. Trouble is that advertising in the search model seems sorta legitmate but an AI that answers whatever it is paid to answer seems thoroughly corrupt and wouldn't have any consumer or political acceptance.

It's that simple. Google used to have "Don't be evil" as a motto, they haven't changed much, just deleted the first word.

The basic story here is about Tay. Microsoft shut Tay down after 16 hours because people found ways to make Tay say "holocaust denier" kind of stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)

If Tay says out-of-Overton things, and Satya defends it for long enough, that can actually harm MS's legacy business.

If Tay can't say out-of-Overton things, it's kind of hard to launch Tay. Launching Tay and taking it down within 16 hours is also not desirable.

It doesn't, but competing with OpenAI does.

Google likes their ducks in a row. Google Search and YouTube are prime examples; every interaction is subsidized with an advertisement. It's not hard to look at a series of screenshots from either service and circle the spot where your attention was monetized. With ChatGPT, that is not possible. Worse yet, the infrastructure costs of providing GPT-3 scale models for free is massive. It's being subsidized by API and premium subscription profits, which is even more baffling since only a few of the ChatGPT users will become paying customers with their current offerings.

So, Google is apprehensive to release a competitor. It's not hard to imagine FAANG having "GPT-4 killers" in their labs, but engineering a way to make it all profitable is the hard part.

It threatens the status quo for product managers!