Sundar Pichai confirms Google is working on AI search feature users can “engage directly with”

Google announced its Q4 earnings just hours ago, more on those numbers later, but Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, confirmed in the earnings call the search company’s plans to bring AI-like search features that “people can engage directly with.”

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.”

“So I view it as very, very early days, but we are committed to putting our experiences, both in terms of new products and experiences, actually bringing direct LLM experiences in Search, making APIs available for developers and enterprises and learn from there and iterate like we’ve always done. So I’m looking forward to it,” he added.

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.”

Earlier reports. Earlier this week, we reported Google is rumored to have started on its own version named Apprentice Bard. CNBC reported,

When a question is entered, the search results show a gray bubble directly under the search bar, offering more human-like responses than typical search results. Directly beneath that, the page suggests several follow-up questions related to the first one. Under that, it shows typical search results, including links and headlines.

Google responded:

“We have long been focused on developing and deploying AI to improve people’s lives. We believe that AI is foundational and transformative technology that is incredibly useful for individuals, businesses and communities, and as our AI Principles outline, we need to consider the broader societal impacts these innovations can have. We continue to test our AI technology internally to make sure it’s helpful and safe, and we look forward to sharing more experiences externally soon.”

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.