Following its key competitor’s lead, Google aims to introduce conversational AI to its flagship Search product, CEO Sundar Pichai told The Wall Street Journal in an interview.
“Will people be able to ask questions to Google and engage with LLMs [large language models] in the context of search? Absolutely,” he said.
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Google has already said it would integrate LLMs into search, but this is the first time the company has announced plans for conversational features.
The decision isn’t surprising, especially because Microsoft just unveiled a version of its own Bing search engine that utilises OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI engine.
Yet, given Google’s 93.4 per cent global control of the search business, its deployment could have a greater impact. Pichai went on to say that he regarded AI chat as a potential for Google to enhance its search business rather than a threat.
“The opportunity space, if anything, is bigger than before,” he told the WSJ.
Pichai did not provide a timetable for chat AI search, but it is evident that Google is trailing Microsoft. The publication of ChatGPT by OpenAI prompted Google to declare a “code red” because the AI posed an existential danger to its main business.
That proved justified, as Microsoft (which owns a significant portion of OpenAI) quickly produced a version of Bing Search powered by OpenAI’s latest GPT 4 model, which gave it some amazing powers.
Google launched their own conversational AI, Bard, as a distinct chat product rather than as part of Search.
It was plainly lagging behind ChatGPT, though, as it displayed wrong replies in a Twitter ad. In an effort to overcome the gap, Pichai recently stated that Google would soon convert to a more “capable” language model.
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While Google is reducing positions to meet Pichai’s objective of becoming 20% more productive, the business is also boosting work on new AI products. It intends to increase collaboration between divisions such as Google Brain and DeepMind, its two core AI groups, in order to be more efficient.
“Expect a lot more, stronger collaboration, because some of these efforts will be more compute-intensive, so it makes sense to do it at a certain scale together,” he said.
