Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company plans to upgrade its popular search tools with AI features. The changes would allow users to interact in more human-like ways with the search engine.
The news comes after competitor Microsoft beefed up its search engine Bing with ChatGPT in February.
Pichai does not feel competing chatbots threaten Google’s search business. “The opportunity space, if anything, is bigger than before,” he stated. Google’s search business accounts for more than half of the revenue of its parent company Alphabet Inc., yielding $162 billion of revenue last year.
“Will people be able to ask questions to Google and engage with [chatbots] in the context of search? Absolutely,” Pichai told the Wall Street Journal in an interview on Tuesday.
In the interview, the Google CEO revealed that the company was working on several AI-based search products, including one allowing users to ask follow-up questions after viewing the search results. However, Pichai avoided stating any specific release date.
Pichai told the Journal that Bard, Google’s answer to ChatGPT, “draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.” It “seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models,” he added.
Last month, Sissie Hsiao, Google’s VP of Product, still referred to the tool as “an early experiment.” Bard can gather and present information from the web in fluid, coherent paragraphs, but it cannot always assess whether the collected data is correct.
As an LLM (Large Language Model), Bard is “statistically predicting what next word to add to the sentence,” Hsiao said. “As a result, sometimes it makes these mistakes. It’s hallucinating that string of words.”
Bard is only available to a group of “trusted testers” before its universal release gets the green light. Google is fine-tuning the program based on the testers’ evaluations of Bard’s generated responses.
Earlier this month, Google announced the implementation of generative AI into its Google Workspace apps like Gmail and Google Docs, shortly after Microsoft revealed it would be integrating ChatGPT into its widely-used Office apps Word, Excel, Outlook, and Powerpoint. This kind of Generative AI can summarize meeting notes, organize tasks, and translate text.
As have many others in the tech industry, Google has been facing investor pressure to cut costs. In January, Alphabet announced it would be laying off 12,000 employees in the coming months—no less than 6 percent of its total staff—its current most extensive layoffs.
The company will also reduce spending on company-issued laptops and employee perks such as its “micro-kitchens” with free drinks and snacks. Pichai also stated that executives would receive lower bonuses.
