Google is reported to declare a code red over ChatGPT

The New York Times reported that Google’s leadership had declared an internal “code red” over the threat ChatGPT posed to its search business, with chief executive Sundar Pichai personally involved in a series of meetings to redirect the company’s AI strategy. According to the reporting, Google reassigned teams from research, Trust and Safety and other groups to accelerate work on AI prototypes and products, including image-generation tools and a chatbot-style version of Search, with an internal target of showing progress at Google’s developer conference the following May.

The reported urgency reflected what ChatGPT threatened structurally rather than technically: Google had published, and in several respects led, much of the underlying research — the transformer architecture GPT models were built on came from a Google paper — but its dominant search-advertising business gave it strong incentives not to ship a product that answered questions directly and reduced the number of ad-supported search result pages users saw. OpenAI, without a comparable business to protect, had no equivalent disincentive.

The episode became a widely cited example of competitive pressure overriding institutional caution: three weeks after ChatGPT’s launch, later reporting said the pressure was severe enough that co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who had stepped back from daily operations years earlier, were brought back into product discussions. Google’s public response followed within seven weeks, when it announced Bard on 6 February 2023 — a launch quickly overshadowed by a factual error in its own promotional material.