This week Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, announced that his company’s internet search engine — the way the vast majority of humans interact with a near-total corpus of human knowledge — is about to change. Enter a query, and you’ll get more than pages and pages of links, along with a few suggested answers. Now you’ll get an assist from artificial intelligence.
“Soon,” a Google blog post under Pichai’s byline declared, “you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web.” A chatbot named Bard will deliver search results in complete sentences, as a human might.
A day later Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, announced that his company’s competing search engine, Bing, will do the same, using the tech behind the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. No search engine has ever really challenged Google’s hold on the world’s questions; Microsoft sees AI as its chance to come at the king.
