Parmy Olson, Columnist

ChatGPT’s ‘IPhone Moment’ Poses a New Threat to Google

Its new plugins could turn it into the web’s switchboard, giving people a new reason to ditch the search giant.

April 3, 2023 at 4:00 AM UTC

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

IPhone moment?
Photographer: Olivier Douliery/AFP

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Just as we were getting used to the idea of ChatGPT writing emails and conducting research, OpenAI has upgraded it with capabilities that make it even more of a threat to big tech companies such as Google. ChatGPT’s new plugins, released last week with relatively little fanfare, are a major leap forward for the technology.

In a nutshell, it is going from merely generating text to taking action on the web, turning it into the type of powerful virtual assistant that Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Apple Inc. have been trying to build for years.