Google CEO Sundar Pichai Says Search To Include Chat AI (wsj.com) 27
Google plans to add conversational artificial-intelligence features to its flagship search engine, Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said, as it deals with pressure from chatbots such as ChatGPT and wider business issues. From a report: Advances in AI would supercharge Google's ability to answer an array of search queries, Mr. Pichai said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. He dismissed the notion that chatbots posed a threat to Google's search business, which accounts for more than half of revenue at parent Alphabet. "The opportunity space, if anything, is bigger than before," Mr. Pichai, who also heads Alphabet, said in the interview Tuesday.
Google has long been a leader in developing computer programs called large language models, or LLMs, which can process and respond to natural-language prompts with humanlike prose. But it hasn't yet used the technology to influence the way people use search -- something Mr. Pichai said would change. "Will people be able to ask questions to Google and engage with LLMs in the context of search? Absolutely," Mr. Pichai said. With Microsoft already deploying the technology behind the ChatGPT system in its Bing search engine, Mr. Pichai is dealing with one of the biggest threats to Google's core business in years as he also faces investor pressure to cut costs. In January, Alphabet said it would eliminate about 12,000 jobs, or 6% of staff, its largest layoffs to date. Inflation and recession concerns have spurred other tech companies to cut back.
Mr. Pichai said Google hasn't yet achieved a goal of becoming 20% more productive, a target he set in September. He said the company was comfortable with its pace of change, though he wouldn't directly address the prospects of another round of layoffs. [...] When asked why the company didn't release a chatbot earlier, Mr. Pichai said Google was still trying to find the right market. "We were iterating to ship something, and maybe timelines changed, given the moment in the industry," he said. Google will continue to improve Bard with new AI models, Mr. Pichai said, while declining to comment on when the product would become freely available without a wait list.
Google has long been a leader in developing computer programs called large language models, or LLMs, which can process and respond to natural-language prompts with humanlike prose. But it hasn't yet used the technology to influence the way people use search -- something Mr. Pichai said would change. "Will people be able to ask questions to Google and engage with LLMs in the context of search? Absolutely," Mr. Pichai said. With Microsoft already deploying the technology behind the ChatGPT system in its Bing search engine, Mr. Pichai is dealing with one of the biggest threats to Google's core business in years as he also faces investor pressure to cut costs. In January, Alphabet said it would eliminate about 12,000 jobs, or 6% of staff, its largest layoffs to date. Inflation and recession concerns have spurred other tech companies to cut back.
Mr. Pichai said Google hasn't yet achieved a goal of becoming 20% more productive, a target he set in September. He said the company was comfortable with its pace of change, though he wouldn't directly address the prospects of another round of layoffs. [...] When asked why the company didn't release a chatbot earlier, Mr. Pichai said Google was still trying to find the right market. "We were iterating to ship something, and maybe timelines changed, given the moment in the industry," he said. Google will continue to improve Bard with new AI models, Mr. Pichai said, while declining to comment on when the product would become freely available without a wait list.
Because what Google needs... (Score:5, Insightful)
...is an even *greater* tendency to toss what I specifically asked it to search for and instead try to guess what I really meant.
So is "A.I." this years tech fad? (Score:1)
Remember last year and blockchain? There were even university degree plans set up around this. It was supposed to solve everything, from buying jpegs to logging when you took a shit. Now no one gives a literal shit about it.
2023 is the year of AI on the Linux desktop. What will next year's cyber fad be?
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Indeed. Fortunately I have stopped using Google search a year ago and I am still not missing it (mostly using DuckDuckGo these days). Google search has gotten worse and worse and more annoying on top of that.
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Because what Google needs is an even *greater* tendency to toss what I specifically asked it to search for and instead try to guess what I really meant
I honestly think it does. The probability of a SEO-spam page having the exact words+terms I search for has become so high, that searching by words and terms now results in low signal quality. The existing PageRank has become so corrupted by SEO-spam that it too is no longer a good ranking tool. I think that a machine-learning tool has the chance to get ahead of SEO-spammers for a year or two (until they catch up).
Wow (Score:2)
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Yep.
I'd guess the majority of common people out there still do...
Who do you use?
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It's a default in a lot of web browsers yet, and normies (non technical folks) tend to stick with defaults.
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Yeah, like about 90% of us.
https://www.oberlo.com/statist... [oberlo.com].
Page and Brin (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Page and Brin create popular web search engine.
2. Sell out to investors (Alphabet).
3. Allow new management to run search into the ground.
4. Page and Brin secretly sell off their Alphabet shares.
5. They introduce an all new web search, that works similarly to how google *used* to work.
6. Profit $$$
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But it isn't the search part that makes money, it's the data slurping and advertising. To make money off a new search engine, they'd need to get all the traffic again, and then turn it into an advertising empire again. But they're rich enough that they don't care now. Also, Google worked well to begin with because it was immune to being gamed the way people gamed its contemporaries like AltaVista. Now people know how to game the original Google algorithm. It wouldn't be easy to replicate that early suc
Androids dreaming of electric sheep (Score:5, Interesting)
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I haven't tried asking bing questions that require multiple steps of reasoning so the answer is not directly attributable to
Not a God (Score:2)
I tried DDG's LLM interface.
I typed in a question and it started to respond with an answer. DDG displayed it at about 2 words per second as if they were trying to mimic another being typing back.
I closed it after about 4 seconds and just did a normal search.
The sales angle seems to be people searching for conversation with an omnicient household God. To me that's absurd but maybe they have a sales model.
And LLM's definitely don't proceed in linear grammatical order so it's entirely a pastiche. Don't lie
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Thanks for that summary. I do use DDG, but you just saved me some time I will now _not_ waste on the LLM interface.
Fire him already (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the lemming way (Score:1)
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Was that snippet suggested by ChatGPT?
meanwhile (Score:2)
Meanwhile, Gmail has become the spammer's tool of choice because no one can fully block Gmail.
Google is dogshit in 2023.
That COULD be a really good move (Score:2)
That COULD be a really good move, but whether it is or not depends on just what is meant. E.g. ChatGPT could be a very good method of natural language input to search string generation. And it could construct a database of the results of frequent questions.
OTOH, if it's used instead of returning search results, well.... it's going to be very hard to trust those results.
AI, the new pivoting to video (Score:2)
This is all garbage tech, like buttchoin and no-friggin-thanks.
What's the use (Score:2)
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To integrate ads into the model, I guess. Like Microsoft is experimenting with Bing. Not sure how they will monetize it, but it can be done - maybe they can get companies to pay for getting their product into the training data set, the same way they pay for product placement in movies...
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Why would including an AI chat feature reduce ad clicks? If Google is good at anything, it's placing ad links. AI chat won't stop that.
Google got caught with their pants down (Score:2)
They developed a search engine that was so superior to all others, that they captured 90% of the market. https://www.oberlo.com/statist... [oberlo.com]. Unfortunately for them, they weren't watching their flank. Microsoft isn't stupid. They invested heavily in ChatGPT / Open AI, in plain sight. Then, when Google was sure that Bing was no threat to them (which it wasn't) MS came out slugging.
It's going to be a fun show to watch.