Google will “Absolutely” bring AI Chat to your searches

New AI features are coming to Google Search. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, CEO Sundar Pichai said that advances in conversational AI have the potential to overwhelm Google’s search engine.

“Will people be able to ask Google questions and engage with LLM in the context of search? Absolutely,” Pichai told the Journal, referring to the large language models that power AI chatbots.

Google hinted last month at plans to integrate AI into its search engine when it does open access to Bardproprietary AI chatbot that is similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. For now, Bard is separate from Google Search with its own website and a waiting list for access.

As the world’s most popular search engine, Google provides information and links in response to billions of queries every day. The introduction of AI chat to Google Search will make the technology available to significantly more people, moving it from the realm of an experimental project to an everyday tool used to find information.

Google did not immediately respond to questions about when the new AI features will be available in Search.

Google introduced Bard in February amid a wave of new generative AI tools and services following ChatGPT’s rapid growth late last year. ChatGPT captures the imagination with its ability to provide human answers to questions, create strangely specific verses, and even write software. By January, it was estimated that ChatGPT had reached 100 million active users, making it the fastest growing web platform ever.

This has led to a flurry of companies introducing their own AI products, including Microsoft’s new Bing search. The new Bing is a big development compared to Google and other traditional search engines. By incorporating AI, it is able to offer more complex answers and information.

Google is testing several new AI-based search products, Pichai told the Journal, including ones that would allow people to ask follow-up questions to their initial query. Google also introduced AI features for its workspace tools, including Gmail and Docs.

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