The creator of Google’s popular email service, Gmail, recently tweeted that he thinks Google could be put out of business by OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot within two years.

Interesting Engineering reports that Gmail’s creator, Paul Buchheit, recently tweeted that he thinks Google will only be in business for two more years due to the rise in popularity of advanced AI tools. A discussion about the future of search engines like Google has erupted in response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the chatbot’s explosive growth.

Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT has gained popularity among millions of users as a place to ask questions. ChatGPT offers responses in a conversational style, as opposed to search engines that return pages of results, making it more straightforward for users to ask follow-up questions. The sudden popularity of ChatGPT has caused Google’s top executives to reassess their priorities and shift their attention to AI products.

Google’s lucrative search engine, which returns search results, is critical to the company’s business strategy. Most of the company’s income comes from advertising charges for listing goods and services next to search results. Google’s revenue in 2021 was over $250 billion, its highest level in the company’s nearly 25-year history.

With the launch of ChatGPT, however, the Gmail maestro thinks Google’s search engine may experience a crisis as users turn to simple solutions rather than indexed pages. Even if Google were to launch internal AI products right away, according to Paul Buchheit, it would be impossible to do so without jeopardizing its primary source of income.

Microsoft has signed a massive deal with ChatGPT’s creator in an effort to integrate the chatbot’s capabilities into its own search engine and overtake Google as the market leader. Although ChatGPT itself does not think its existence will have an impact on Google’s search business, Microsoft would profit from Google’s decline.

The rapid development of ChatGPT and Microsoft’s backing raises the possibility that AI will have a significant influence on the direction of search engines in the future.

Read more at Interesting Engineering here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan