Google CEO Sundar Pichai has revealed that “AI is the most profound technology we are working on today.” He disclosed during a quarterly earnings call on Thursday that Google is channeling considerable infrastructure, technology, and researchers to making AI the best it can be for the online search. He stated however that the tech will be scaled from the ground up.
“AI is the most profound technology we are working on today,” Pichai stated. “Our talented researchers, infrastructure, and technology make us extremely well-positioned as AI reaches an inflection point. More than six years ago, I first spoke about Google being an AI-first company. Since then, we have been a leader in developing AI. We are just at the beginning of our AI journey, and the best is yet to come.”
Pichai guaranteed investors and tech analysts that despite the emerging threats of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s AI tech remains superior to any rival’s. He said that Google had always been developing and investing in AI for decades – even though most of its AI products remain secret from the public. For example, there is the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), an image-generation AI known as Imagen, the Playground application, and the Pathways Language Model (PaLM) among others.
Pichai said LaMDA among other AI-based language models will be deployed in the coming months gradually. This will work to make online search operations faster and more relevant for recognizing, summarizing, and generating texts in various fields. He explained that the deep learning algorithm will be able to compose, construct, and summarize various topical content from expansive data that users will find helpful.
“Now that we can integrate more direct LLM-type experiences in Search, I think it will help us expand and serve new types of use cases, generative use cases,” Pichai said. “And so, I think I see this as a chance to rethink and reimagine and drive Search to solve more use cases for our users as well. It’s early days, but you will see us be bold, put things out, get feedback, and iterate and make things better.”
Given that Microsoft is reportedly incorporating GPT-4, a faster version of ChatGPT, into Bing to make the search engine generally acceptable than Google, Pichai’s executive team reached out to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to tackle the rising adoption of ChatGPT in the technology space. After a series of meetings, Pichai assured investors that the company will not just foister AI on users, but will launch beta features of AI-based products in phases before diving in.
Meanwhile, Google announced it is investing $300 million in Anthropic, an AI startup located in San Francisco, raising the firm’s valuation to about $5 billion. Microsoft also announced injecting millions into OpenAI in a stiff competition to outsmart Google and drive its monopoly underground. And then Google publicized that it is having a Search and AI event on February 8, an event that analysts believe will showcase Google’s strides at using AI to reimagine how to search information can be faster and more intuitive.