alphabet and google CEO Sundar Pichai said Thursday that the company will soon add advanced AI capabilities to its search engine.
CNBC reported on Tuesday that Google is testing some of these features with employees as part of its “Code Red” plan to support ChatGPT. microsoftThey include a chatbot called “Apprentice Bard” and a new search desktop design that can be used in a question and answer format.
“Soon, in an experimental and innovative way, people will be able to interact directly with the latest and most powerful language model as a companion to search,” he said, referring to Google’s conversational technology LaMDA, or Language for Conversational Applications. Mentioned the model.
Pichai said it will release a large language model “in the coming weeks and months” so the company can get more feedback.
Executives frequently returned to the topic of artificial intelligence on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “AI is the deepest technology we are working on right now,” Pichai said in his opening remarks.
The effort to turn its attention to AI comes at a time when the company faces pressure on its core advertising business and competitive threats from one of its historic rivals.
Thursday’s earnings report marked the fourth straight quarter that the company underperformed Wall Street expectations on both earnings and earnings, according to forecast estimates provided by Refinitiv. The weakness in the advertising business was manifested in an 8% drop in YouTube’s ad revenue and a 2% drop in Google’s search and other revenue.
Google is also facing pressure from ChatGPT, launched late last year by Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Google’s main business is web search, and the company has long been an AI pioneer. However, generative AI products like ChatGPT can provide creative answers to more complex queries, potentially threatening the entire model of internet search.
Microsoft is reportedly We are considering adding ChatGPT functionality to our own search engine, Bing.The threat of falling behind in AI reportedly spurred the Google co-founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin To get you directly interested in what you’re working on a few years after you stepped down from day-to-day work at the company in 2019.
In addition to touting upcoming search improvements, the company also changed the financial reporting structure of its DeepMind artificial intelligence segment, starting in the first quarter, to roll up to Google rather than other betting segments with longer gains. I said I will. Projects such as self-driving cars and venture capital investments.
Google bought the London-based company for over $500 million in 2014, and brought it under Other Bets when the company reorganized as Alphabet in 2015. DeepMind turns profit for the first time in his 2021.
The report change “reflects DeepMind’s strategic focus to support each segment,” Alphabet’s chief financial officer Ruth Porat said on Thursday’s earnings call.
Pointing to cybersecurity firm Chronicle, which joined Google’s cloud division in 2019, Porat said, “To be clear, the integration of other bets into Google is based on whether that bet is with a product within Google or Alphabet. Only if we support the service broadly,” he added. effective. “
Pichai also said the company will provide developers, creators and partners with “new tools” and APIs to “enable new possibilities for AI to be discovered. These models are particularly good at creating, building and abstracting. I have,” he added.
But Pichai also cautioned that it would need to scale slowly, saying he believed the language’s mass use was still in its “nascent stages.”
CNBC previously reported that employees asked about threats from ChatGPT at an internal meeting, and Google’s Jeff Dean told employees that Google had a much higher “risk of reputational damage” by providing incorrect information, As such, he said he is moving “more conservatively than smaller startups.”
