Is there more to Alphabet than Google search?

LAST NOVEMBER something strange happened in Mountain View. A thick fog enveloped the headquarters of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Not the meteorological sort—this stretch of Silicon Valley is reliably sunny. It was a fog of confusion. Its cause was ChatGPT, an artificially intelligent conversationalist created by OpenAI, a startup backed by Microsoft. The effect was, by all accounts, panic. ChatGPT was giving uncannily humanlike…