Google launched a new search engine powered with artificial intelligence to try and make up for lost ground.
The US tech group announced on Wednesday a revamp of its search engine that incorporates AI advances. These have been making their way through the tech industry since Microsoft’s ChatGPT, backed by OpenAI, was launched six months ago.
Sundar Pichai said, “We are taking a bold step forward with generative AI. We have a responsible and aggressive approach.” Sundar Pichai was the Google CEO at a Wednesday presentation.
Google announced at its annual developer conference that it will offer millions of users an AI-generated summary to their queries, similar to the summaries given by ChatGPT and other chatbots.
The US will be the first country to offer this feature through a wait list. Google announced that it would roll out this feature to more people in the next few months.PaLM 2 is the AI model that powers Google’s AI-driven search, Bard chatbot, and other products like Gmail and Google Docs. It was launched Wednesday.
Google is scrambling to keep up with Microsoft in consumer AI products. Microsoft’s AI-powered Bing search engine, powered by OpenAI GPT technology, was launched in February. OpenAI released its GPT-4 language model a month later. Users can access it through the premium version of ChatGPT or via Bing.
The first new front has been opened in the fight for dominance in search for over a decade with the emergence of generative AI, which can produce plausible answers in natural language.
Microsoft’s revamp of Bing has caused a drop in Alphabet’s share price, Google’s parent. This loss of billions of dollars is due to Wall Street’s concern about the possible damage that a new AI war with Microsoft could do to Google’s dominance.
Alphabet , the parent company of Alphabet, merged its DeepMind AI and Google Brain AI research divisions in April to speed up AI development.
Google’s revamped search engine allows users to continue a conversation about the initial search query without having to repeat the context or information already provided.
AI-driven responses will also include links back to the web sources that they are derived from in an attempt to combat so-called hallucinations and fabricated information. Users can still access the original Google Search format, which is a list with links beneath the machine-generated results.
“Users are looking for information to be attached to prominent brands, such as. . . Cathy Edwards is vice-president at Google Search. “We don’t believe users want an AI to tell them the answer,” said Cathy Edwards, vice-president of Google Search.
Edwards said that the AI-generated suggestions would provide more information as users explored the results. Google was worried that AI-generated results would lead to fewer clicks on ads, thereby undermining the core business.
Google uses AI in all of its products. Its search engine, which can choose the most relevant search results, or autocomplete queries, as well as Google Docs, Gmail and Smart Compose, are examples. Last year, the company reported 180bn AI usages in its workspace tools.
AI will now allow users to generate images and tables automatically and create slideshows using AI.
Slav Petrov is a Google research scientist. He said, “We are not trying to replace humans but rather help them get their work done faster by giving them a starting point.”
Google’s new Search results will include a social feature, called Perspectives. This will allow users to see information about popular people on social media platforms, discussion boards and blogs in the form videos, images, and written posts rather than just links to websites.