Amid the rise of ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya thinks Google Search will be the biggest loser of 2023

• Chamath Palihapitiya is a venture capitalist who has invested in companies like Slack and Yammer.
• On the business podcast All-In, Palihapitiya said Google Search will be the biggest business loser of 2023.

For years, Google has wielded an unparalleled dominance over our ability to search the interwebs.

But 2023 might be the year Google's kingdom ends its reign, according to venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya.

"I think that the biggest potential business loser this year is Google search as measured by pure profitability and engagement," Palihapitiya said on the All-In podcast on Friday.

The All-In podcast is a business podcast co-hosted by four tech industry veterans — former PayPal COO David Sacks, investor David Friedberg, entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, and Palihapitiya.

One of the most obvious threats to Google is ChatGPT, a chatbot that relies on a new form of artificial intelligence called generative AI. Google issued a "code red" on the potentially competitive technology in late December, and CEO Sundar Pichai has already redirected certain teams to sharpen their focus on AI products, Insider reported.

However, Palihapitiya doesn't think that ChatGPT is the only reason Google's search business might be on shaky grounds this year.

"I think it's easier for me to see where the usage comes from as opposed to picking OpenAI or ChatGPT in terms of where the usage goes to," he said.

The reason for that, he said, boils down to how machine learning and artificial intelligence work. Palihapitiya said these concepts break down into "two big buckets."

The first is "learning," which he defined as how a technology learns to make predictions. While the second is "inference," which he said is retrieving search results from a typed query.

"The thing with learning, and what ChatGPT is showing, is that they have learned by crawling the entirety of the web," he said. "There are five or six other organizations that are capable of crawling the entire web in terms of cost, in terms of compute, in terms of the quality of the transformers, and the quality of the AI."

With enough time and money, Palihapitiya said companies like Microsoft, Oracle, "Chinese internet companies," and even Facebook could be potential competitors to Google search.