Google plans to follow Microsoft’s strategy, which is to bring conversational artificial intelligence to its search engine exactly as the Redmond company did with Bing. This was revealed by Sundar Pichai to the Wall Street Journal.
The CEO sees chatbots as an opportunity and not a threat at all. In essence, a search engine with advanced capabilities would be able to provide even more answers than it already does: “The opportunity space, if anything, is bigger than before,” admitted the number one of Alphabet.
Opportunities that the company does not want to miss in the slightest: if until recently Google was in fact the undisputed leader of web search, now its position has been undermined by the rapid development of Bing and its (new) beating heart represented by the OpenAI chatbot, with which Microsoft has signed a billionaire partnership. This for Alphabet means risking losing market share: every percentage point gained, says Satya Nadella, brings 2 billion dollars into the pockets of the Redmond company. And Google can’t afford to scale back in that regard, considering that search-related ads generated $162 billion in revenue in 2022.
After all, the know-how in Mountain View is not lacking: for some time the company has been developing large language models (LLM), but until now there have been no direct applications to the search engine or to any other tool or consumer product. And the recent layoffs that affected 12,000 employees (6% of the total workforce) have not slowed down the race to artificial intelligence.
So much so that two months after the debut Bard and Google’s generative AI systems have already undergone a significant evolution: the transition from a simplified version of LaMDA to the proprietary PaLM language model represents a fundamental phase in the development of the technology. Pichai revealed that the intention would be to make users interact directly with proprietary language models through chats on the search engine: until now, however, unlike what Microsoft did with Bing, all experiments on LLMs have remained separate from Google Search activity.
To speed up the process of refining chatbots, Google envisages direct involvement of the Brain and DeepMind teams: “I expect more and stronger collaboration,” Pichai said, “because some of these efforts will require high computational intensity, so it makes sense to do it together at a certain scale.”