Google announced its fourth-quarter earnings just hours ago, and more on those numbers later, but Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during the resulting conference call that the search company will use AI to We introduced a search function like this and confirmed that it is possible to "search people directly".
Sundar Pichai said, “In the coming weeks and months, we’ll make these language models available, starting with LaMDA, so that people can engage directly with them. This will help us continue to get feedback, test, and safely improve them. These models are particularly amazing for composing, constructing, and summarizing. They will become even more useful for people as they provide up-to-date more factual information.”
Sundar Pichai said that he “first spoke about Google being an AI-first company” more than “six years ago.” “We have been preparing for this moment since early last year, and you’re going to see a lot from us in the coming few months across three big areas of opportunity; first, large models. We published extensively about LaMDA and PoN, the industry’s largest, most sophisticated model plus extensive work at DeepMind,” he continued to say.
During the question and answer period, Sundar added “We’ll be launching — we’ll — more as labs products in certain cases, beta features in certain cases and just slowly scaling up from there. Obviously, we need to make sure we’re iterating in public, these models will keep getting better, so the field is fast changing. The serving costs will need to be improved.”
Sundar goes on to add, “In terms of Search too, 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. And so I think I see this as a chance to rethink and re-imagine and drive Search to solve more use cases for our users as well. So again, early days, you will see us be bold, put things out, get feedback and iterate and make things better.”
Microsoft. Meanwhile, Microsoft invested heavily in OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. Microsoft is rumored to be bringing GPT-4 to Bing search in some way in the very near future. Many companies, especially those in search, are taking these technologies very seriously after the explosion OpenAI made with the debut of ChatGPT.
Why we care. We don’t know yet how Google or Bing would incorporate these Q&A style AI features into search. But we all know it is an important space to keep an eye on to see how marketers can leverage it for their brands and how they use utilize these features to better connect with their customers and users.
