ChatGPT subscribers cut their Google page views by 8 to 11%

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 16:22

   Andy Jassy here talking at lunch, Kevin Weil from OpenAI. And one of the topics was consumer AI. And I thought one of the most incredible pieces of data that you guys shared was looking at the impact that ChatGPT, which is now scaling to, you know, kind of a billion users, is having on Google. And you did this by conjoining a couple pieces of data that you guys had. So, Thomas, do you want to talk to us a little bit?

2. 16:48

   This is slides 22 and slides 24 and slides 26. I'll pass it to Philippe for this chart. Okay, okay. I think Bill and I were chatting about this earlier. Anecdotally, it certainly seems to be the case, right? The more people I talk to, the more I ask them, do you feel like your Google search has been impacted by ChatGPT? And resoundingly, almost everybody at this point now agrees that that's the case, right?

3. 17:18

   And we can argue whether the queries are commercial or not. I think the queries are getting more commercial every day. But without a doubt, it's having that impact. We could not prove it numerically. It felt intuitively true. Obviously, Google is telling you it isn't. So I think we went about seeing, is there a numerical assumption that we can make that would kind of prove this out? And I think you should introduce the work that we put in this slide.

4. 17:43

   And by the way, as we, you know, all these platforms have some businesses that get threatened and other businesses and Google could still be an amazing company by just saying, listen, maybe search is under threat. But YouTube is, with all this new AI content, going to explode and potentially threaten Netflix, and maybe Waymo is going to also do incredibly well. So our judgment more is around what exactly happens.

5. 18:09

   Well, we've talked about, I mean, the assets of the Android phone and the Gmail and the Google Docs, that's a nice set of complementary pieces. They have so many great assets. It'll be very interesting to see how it plays. You know, for me, if I were CEO of Google, that would be way above my pay scale. I would have no idea how to put it all together. But God, is it just fun to be alive and just see how, what's Amazon going to do?

6. 18:34

   What's Google going to do? What are all these guys? So what we try to do here is as part of the data science that we do, we process probably a hundred million credit card receipts a day. So we have a very fine view of what the U.S. consumer does. and we have another data set where we know what consumers do based on their email receipts and the trick was to try to join those two data sets and in general in data science my only lessons learned is data is useless unless you can join data sets that don't speak to each other that is the unlock and so we did that and what you see on that uh chart is that absent chat gdp chat gpt maybe google page views for particular user going four percent per year so we are consuming more google then we get a subscription to chat gdp which we chat jesus christ i confused

7. 19:30

   gdp and gpt we get a subscription and now we're like ah this guy's paying 20 bucks a month yes and then we track once he started paying the 20 bucks a month to open ai what happens to the usage And you can see peak to trough, it's down 8% year over year. Peak to trough, it's, let's say, down 11%. So clearly, page views are going down. And that's over almost two years, right? So it's not like it's immediate.

8. 20:00

   it. It's not like it's an immediate giant threat. But one thing we've learned and Thomas and I repeat that to each other all the time is these major shifts, they just start one little step at a time. And that one little step becomes a gigantic move quickly. So you can't underestimate these small moves. And I think this confirms something that we all know anecdotally as we're talking about. Well, and I think that, you know, even slide