Founded in 1998, Google has since become one of the most powerful, and the biggest tech companies ever.
Now, that the company is a multi-billion dollar brand, both Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, had left the company's daily operations.
While the two are still the company's board members, both Page and Brin have mostly taken a hands-off approach with the company since 2019, allowing CEO Sundar Pichai to take the reins.
They only visited the offices of Google, and the company's parent company, Alphabet, to check in on its "moonshot" projects.
But this time, the two are forced to make a return to the company they founded.
This happened at the invitation of Pichai, who emphasized the urgency felt among many Google executives about AI, and in particular, the OpenAI ChatGPT.
Google is one of the main drivers of AI, as well as one of the pioneers. But in most use cases, its AI products only power its own products, not enhancing the experience of something else.
And in one way or another, OpenAI's ChatGPT is making Google worried.
Following the release of the AI, and after the tech world began to realize how powerful this AI can be, Pichai sounded the alarm, issuing a "code red," The New York Times reported.
The company asked Page and Brin for help, because ChatGPT has sparked internal concerns over the continued dominance of Google's search engine.
Pichai as the CEO of both Alphabet and Google, held several meetings with other executives, as well as with Page and Brin, to discuss Google's artificial intelligence strategy.
At first, the two founders provided advice to the executives at Alphabet who have made artificial intelligence the priority of their strategy, and made it to employ 12 powerful people dedicated to working on the type of technology necessary to combat the threat from ChatGPT.
It's reported that both Page and Brin have reviewed, and also approved a number of AI projects and ideas, and advocated for adding more chatbot features to Google's search engine.
In all, Google's counter-offensive strategy also involves launching around 20 new AI products in 2023.
All that in order to maintain the company's dominance in AI, as well as "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible," the company said in its mission.
OpenAI was less of a threat before.
But since Microsoft started investing huge money in OpenAI, things have become more like an arm race.
While previously, Google has an advantage, but with Microsoft backing OpenAI, the game changed. Google has to compete with OpenAI, with Microsoft at its back.
And this may not be an easy feat, since Microsoft is already a tech giant on its own, and that it has started enhancing Bing, its search engine, with ChatGPT.
While ChatGPT is not perfect, and has been criticized for sometimes putting forward answers that are factually incorrect, the technology is highly advanced, and extremely impressive. The technology has demonstrated how generative AI can be user-friendly, practical, and productive.
2019 to 2023 is a long time, in terms of tech years. During that time frame, numerous tech has been created, developed, and marketed. Many tech companies have been born, and social media, as well as the mobile industry, have been making billions of dollars in profit.
But nothing put fear straight to Google's heart like ChatGPT, that the company had to again rely on its founders for help, by pulling them out of their "retirement."
This signals that ChatGPT is different from the competitors that Google has faced and defeated in years. Pichai has made an exceptional move that shows the urgency of the situation.