Google opens ChatGPT rival Bard to 180 countries, with plans to give internet search an AI upgrade
- On the same day Google announced expanded access to its Bard chatbot, it revealed it is planning to integrate it into its dominant search engine
- The move comes nearly three months after Microsoft started testing ChatGPT-powered search amid an AI arms race kicked off by the popular bot
Bard’s multilingual expansion will begin with Japanese and Korean before adding about 40 more languages.
Now Google is ready to test the AI waters with its search engine, which has been synonymous with finding things on the internet for the past 20 years and serves as the pillar of a digital advertising empire that generated more than US$220 billion in revenue last year.
“We are at an exciting inflection point,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told a packed developers conference in a speech peppered with one AI reference after another. “We are reimagining all our products, including search.”
More AI technology will be coming to Google’s Gmail with a “Help Me Write” option that will produce lengthy replies to emails in seconds, and a tool for photos called “Magic Editor” that will automatically doctor pictures.
The AI transition will begin cautiously with the search engine that serves as Google’s crown jewel.
The deliberate approach reflects the balancing act that Google must negotiate as it tries to remain on the cutting edge while also preserving its reputation for delivering reliable search results – a mantle that could be undercut by artificial intelligence’s penchant for fabricating information that sounds authoritative.
The tendency to produce deceptively convincing answers to questions – a phenomenon euphemistically described as “hallucinations” – has already been cropping up during the early testing of Bard, which like ChatGPT, relies on still-evolving generative AI technology.
The AI results will be clearly tagged as an experimental form of technology and Google is pledging the AI-generated summaries will sound more factual than conversational – a distinct contrast from Bard and ChatGPT, which are programmed to convey more humanlike personas. Google is building in guardrails that will prevent the AI baked into the search engine from responding to sensitive questions about health – such as, “Should I give Tylenol to a 3-year-old?” – and finance matters. In those instances, Google will continue to steer people to authoritative websites.
Google is not predicting how long it will be before its search engine will include generative AI results for all comers. The Mountain View, California-based company has been under intensifying pressure to demonstrate how its search engine will maintain its leadership since Microsoft began to load AI into Bing, which remains a distant second to Google.
Alphabet’s shares surged 4 per cent on Wednesday after Google’s wave of AI announcements to finish at US$111.75, the highest closing price since Bing began melding with ChatGPT in early February.
As it begins to ingrain AI in its search engine, Google is aiming to make Bard smarter by connecting with the next generation of a massive data set known as a large language model (LLM) that fuels it. The LLM that Bard relies on is dubbed Pathways Language Model, or PaLM. The AI in Google’s search engine will draw upon the next-generation PaLM2 and another technology known as a Multitask Unified Model, or MUM.
Although people will have to wait to see how Google’s search engine will deploy generative AI to find answers, a new tool soon be more broadly available to all users. Google is going to add a new filter called “Perspectives” that will focus on what people are saying online about whatever topic is entered into the search engine. The new feature will be placed along existing search filters for news, images and video.
Foldable smartphones so far have remained a niche market, largely because of prices ranging between US$1,500 and US$2,000. Last year, about 14 million foldable phones were sold worldwide, accounting for just 1 per cent of overall smartphone shipments, according to the research firm International Data Corp.
Google’s foldable Pixel smartphone will sell for US$1,800 and begin shipping next month. It will unfold with a hinge and, of course, be packed with AI.