Sridhar Ramaswamy, who led Google’s advertising division from 2013 to 2018, said Microsoft and Google recognized that their current search business might not survive. “The ad wall and the sea of blue links are a thing of the past,” said Ramaswamy, who now runs Neeva, a subscription search engine.
Amazon, which has a larger share of the cloud market than Microsoft and Google combined, hasn’t been as public in its pursuit of chatbots as the other two, although it has been working on artificial intelligence technology for years.
But in January, Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, corresponded with Hugging Face’s Mr. Delangue, and weeks later, Amazon expanded a partnership to make it easier to offer Hugging Face software to customers.
As the underlying technology, known as generative AI, becomes more widely available, it could fuel new ideas in e-commerce.. Late last year, Manish Chandra, CEO of Poshmark, a popular online thrift store, found himself daydreaming during a long flight from India about chatbots that create profiles of people’s likes and then recommend and buy clothes or electronics. He imagined shopkeepers instantly fulfilling orders for a recipe.
“It becomes your mini-Amazon,” said Mr. Chandra, who has made integrating generative AI into Poshmark one of the company’s top priorities for the next three years. “That layer will be very powerful and disruptive and it will start almost a new layer of retail.”
But generative AI is causing other headaches. In early December, users of stack overflow, a popular social network for computer programmers, started posting poor coding tips written by ChatGPT. The moderators quickly banned the AI-generated text.
Part of the problem was that people could post this questionable content much faster than they could write posts on their own, said Dennis Soemers, the site’s moderator. “Content generated by ChatGPT appears trustworthy and professional, but often isn’t,” he said.
