Conversational AI Is Coming to Google Search, But Not Right Away

pcmag.com:

Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirms the company will revamp its core search engine to include a chat-based AI model, though he doesn't specify a timeline.

“The opportunity space, if anything, is bigger than before,” Pichai tells(Opens in a new window) The Wall Street Journal. "Will people be able to ask questions to Google and engage with LLMs [large language models] in the context of search? Absolutely."

The new experience is more likely to debut in months than years, as ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing are already publicly available. Google released its own AI chatbot, Bard, to the public for beta testing in late March, but it is a waitlist-only "early experiment," as Google puts it.

Bard is a standalone website, separate from the core Google Search engine, though it contains links to the mothership for factchecking and additional information. Pichai says Google is currently refining the product, and needs to prepare its infrastructure for a future public launch.

Given the enormous computing power large language models like Bard, ChatGPT, and Bing consume, the transition will be costly—especially at Google's size (it commands 85%(Opens in a new window) of worldwide search volume, compared to Bing's 9%). Pichai says the company's two AI teams—Google Brain and DeepMind—will collaborate on efforts to reduce the load.

“I 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,” Pichai says. Google also plans to cut 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its workforce, this year.

In our comparison of Bard, ChatGPT, and Bing, a main difference is the way users access them. Bing offers the closest model to what Google may launch since it's already