As ChatGPT wave garners momentum, the belief that it poses a big threat to Google is rapidly growing. Gmail creator, Paul Buchheit, is one of the believers that the web search giant doesn’t stand a chance when the AI-powered chatbot is fully developed.

Buchheit said ChatPGT has the potential to destroy Google in two years at max. He said Google’s downfall will come from the depletion of its search-based revenue, which is the most profitable part of the tech giant’s business.

“Google may be only a year or two away from total disruption. AI will eliminate the Search Engine Result Page, which is where they make most of their money,” Buchheit wrote on Twitter, adding that “even if they catch up on AI, they can’t fully deploy it without destroying the most valuable part of their business!”

Google may be only a year or two away from total disruption. AI will eliminate the Search Engine Result Page, which is where they make most of their money.

Even if they catch up on AI, they can't fully deploy it without destroying the most valuable part of their business! https://t.co/jtq25LXdkj

— Paul Buchheit (@paultoo) December 1, 2022

His assessment is based on the quality of responses given to queries by ChatGPT. The chatbot imbibes GPT-3.5, a large language model released last year, to generate answers and authentic-looking responses to queries about all topics. It also enables users to accomplish tasks such as creating poems, composing college essays and writing code.

“The way I imagine this happening is that the URL/Search bar of the browser gets replaced with AI that autocompletes my thought/question as I type it while also providing the best answer (which may be a link to a website or product),” Buchheit said.

ChatGPT set off an alarm when it was launched in November 2022, racking up more than one million users within its first month. The AI-powered machine has triggered concern across sectors, putting educators on high alert as its widening impact threatens critical thinking. But Google seems to be the only company in the tech industry being rattled by the chatbot.

Microsoft made a whopping $1 billion investment in OpenAI, ChatGPT’s parent company, in 2019, and has increased funding early this year with additional investments worth billions of dollars. Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI includes deal to incorporate ChatGPT with its search engine, Bing.

Google, which reportedly issued “code red” following the unprecedented rise of ChatGPT, has been exploring ways to deal with the chatbot’s emergence. CEO Sundar Pichai is said to have reached out to the company’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin to help accelerate AI projects at Google. The company is reported to be also working on plans to “demonstrate a version of its search engine with chatbot features this year” and is developing more than 20 AI products to seemingly counter ChatGPT, per New York Times.

Financial Express reported that more details of the plans are expected to be revealed during the upcoming Google I/O 2023 developer conference.

But ChatGPT is grappling with shortfalls impeding its reliability. It only has information of events that took place post 2021. OpenAI cofounder and CEO Sam Altman said the chatbot cannot be trusted at this time because it is still prone to misinformation and biases. But it recently announced that it’s working to expand ChatGPT, creating a professional version that will correct its lapses.

However, Buchheit said ChatGPT’s abilities pose existential threat to Google, and will potentially kill it just as Google did to Yellow Pages, a dominant pre-internet business.

“The old search engine backend will be used by the AI to gather relevant information and links, which will then be summarized for the user. It’s like asking a professional human researcher to do the work, except the AI will instantly do what would take many minutes for a human,” he said.

“One thing that few people remember is the pre-Internet business that Google killed: The Yellow Pages!

“The Yellow Pages used to be a great business, but then Google got so good that everyone stopped using the yellow pages. AI will do the same thing to web search,” he added.

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has weighed in on last week’s judgment of Election Petitions Tribunal, which declared Oyetola Adegboyega of All Progressive Congress (APC), the winner of July 16, 2022, Osun State’s governorship election.

But the judgment, which was based on over-voting, has questioned the integrity of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, a new tech system that the electoral umpire is relying on to conduct credible elections in 2023.

The tribunal nullified thousands of votes credited to Peoples Democratic Party candidate, Ademola Adeleke, who was declared the winner of the election by INEC.

But during his appearance on ChannelsTV’s program, Sunrise Daily, on Monday, a former Director, Voter Education and Publicity, INEC, Oluwole Osaze-Uzzi, said the discrepancy that resulted in the over-voting scandal does not discredit the BVAS.

Osaze-Uzzi said the avoidable discrepancy happened because the APC obtained a certified copy of the initial server report before some of the data had been transmitted by the BVAS hardware.

He noted that the situation created two sources of information – the BVAS server and its printout, which he indicated to be the reason while the jury was not unanimous in the verdict.

“The second [tribunal] member – the honourable justice who dissented from his two colleagues – said, ‘I would rather use the primary source of this information, and the primary source of this data is actually the machine itself,’” the INEC official said.

“It is basically a computer. So, rather than go to the server where it transmitted data, I would use the printout from the machine itself.

“The machines were tendered, so were the reports from the server, and there ought not to have been a discrepancy, but somewhere along the line, not all the data had been transmitted at the time the APC obtained the certified copy of the initial server report.”

The Osun State’s governorship election was a test-run of the BVAS, which INEC has touted as a solution to rigging that had characterized Nigerian elections in the past. However, the issue of over-voting has cast doubt on the machine’s ability to help the electoral body deliver election results that would not be contested.

Speaking on that, Osaze-Uzzi said the BVAS exposed the discrepancy, which is a validation that the hardware will play a big role in enhancing the electoral process.

“It was BVAS that exposed that as it were, and the fact that the BVAS report was relied on. But we have to be careful; which of the BVAS reports was relied on? Was it what was transmitted to the server – to the back-end – or was it the BVAS itself?” he asked.

Talking more about the judgment, Osaze-Uzzi said there is a need to break the verdict of the tribunal. He explained that the transmission of data from the BVAS created a discrepancy that resulted in different opinion of the three-man panel. According to him, the chairman and the second member of the tribunal relied on the initial report and the initial report of the back-end, duly certified by INEC.

“It was downloaded from the server [after it was] transmitted. But a couple of days later – INEC used the word ‘synchronised’, I’m not too sure I like that word, but – you synchronise it and say, ‘Have all the results been transmitted – has all data been transmitted from the machine, BVAS itself, to the server?’

“The machine is a physical one and then it transmits to a physical one. It now went, checked and said, ‘There’s a problem here.’ The BVAS report now downloaded itself, [we] now brought it out and examined each BVAS machine and now found out that no, some data was not transmitted to the server,” Osaze-Uzzi said.

The judgment, which has stirred mixed reactions from many quarters, is expected to be looked into by higher courts. Adeleke said he is going to challenge the judgment at the Court of Appeal.