• In an interview with the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Google CEO Sundar Pichai said its conversational AI will be integrated in Search.
• This new version of Search would be designed to go up against Microsoft Bing, which is now powered by ChatGPT.
• There is no timeline for the integration, but Google is clearly looking to keep pace with its AI-powered rivals.

The AI race has heated up rapidly in the past couple of months, with the latest iteration of OpenAI’s ChatGPT forcing many a silicon valley company to scramble. This includes Google, which for the first time is finding itself lagging behind, as Microsoft has been quick to integrate AI into its platforms.

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal (paywall), Google CEO Sundar Pichai, detailed some of the company’s plans in that regard, noting that it is working to integrate conversational AI into Search and its associated tools.

This is not the first time that Google has signalled its intent to integrate AI into Search, with its Bard application viewed as the vehicle for this, but this is the first mention of conversational AI, as Engadget points out.

“Will people be able to ask questions to Google and engage with LLMs [large language models] in the context of search? Absolutely,” said Pichai in the aforementioned interview.

Unfortunately, however, no timeline has been mentioned as to when Google plans to make said integration available to the public. It’s also unclear whether a measured approach is best, especially as Microsoft has beaten the company to the punch on a couple of occasions already.

Added to this is the fact that Bard is not available in countries like SA yet, while the new version of Bing is. We also have not mentioned the fact that public tests of Bard were less than satisfactory, resulting in share prices falling.

As such, Google will need to do this step right. This as Search is the core of the company’s business, and any mistakes in its performance will prove costly.

Either way Google is taking AI as a serious threat to its business, and is therefore looking to leverage it for its own designs too.

“Expect a lot more, stronger collaboration, because some of these efforts will be more compute-intensive, so it makes sense to do it at a certain scale together,” added Pichai.

The AI race is still on, and it’s only getting started if Google’s intentions are to be believed.

[Image – Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash]