ChatGPT rides to the rescue for Google investors – The Irish Times
It’s been a good week for Alphabet shareholders. For all the talk of generative AI toppling Google’s search empire, it has ended up propping it up.
A year ago the US justice department won a landmark case declaring Google an illegal monopolist. Investors braced for a brutal remedy: perhaps a forced sale of Chrome or Android, or the loss of its $20 billion default search deal with Apple.
Then came ChatGPT. By shaking confidence in Google’s dominance, AI gave Judge Amit Mehta a reason to tread lightly.
“The emergence of GenAI changed the course of this case,” he wrote.
End result: no Chrome sale. Rivals will get some access to Google’s data, but the concessions are crumbs beside the cake, as evidenced by investors’ reaction. The stock popped 9 per cent, its biggest one-day gain since March 2006 outside of earnings news.
Despite periodic agonising that AI represents an existential threat to Google, Alphabet is now up more than 130 per cent since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, with the company valued at a record $2.8 trillion.
The irony is unmistakable: for now at least, disruption has proved a friend to Google, not a foe.
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