Google unleashes AI in search | Jobs

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Google on Tuesday unveiled an improved search engine that frequently prioritizes responses created by artificial intelligence over website links. While the change promises to speed up the search for information, it also has the potential to disrupt the flow of money-making Internet traffic.

The revamp, announced at Google's annual developer conference, begins this week in the US and will see hundreds of millions of people regularly see summaries of conversations generated by the company's AI technology at the top of search engine results pages. become.

AI summaries will only appear when Google's technology determines it's the quickest and most effective way to satisfy your curiosity. This solution is most likely to occur with complex themes or when people are brainstorming or planning. Simple searches like store recommendations or weather forecasts will likely continue to show links and ads to Google's traditional website.

Google began testing AI Overview with a select group of users a year ago, but the company is currently making the feature a staple of search results in the U.S. before rolling it out in other parts of the world. It is one of the By the end of the year, Google expects AI overviews to appear repeatedly in search results for about 1 billion people.

In addition to bringing more AI to its dominant search engine, Google used the packed conference, held at an outdoor theater in Mountain View, Calif., near its headquarters, to explore new technologies that will reshape business and society. Introducing progress.

The next steps in AI include more advanced analytics powered by Gemini, a technology announced five months ago, and a nascent version called “Astra” that can understand, explain, and remember. It included smart assistants, or “agents.” Viewed through a smartphone camera lens. Google highlighted its AI efforts by having Demis Hassabis, the executive who oversees AI technology, speak for the first time at the company's flagship conference.

The introduction of AI to Google's search engine marks one of the most dramatic changes the company has made to its foundation since its founding in the late 1990s. This is a move that opens the door to further growth and innovation, but it also threatens to cause major changes in web surfing habits.

“This bold and responsible approach is fundamental to fulfilling our mission and making AI more useful for everyone,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai told reporters. ” he said.

Pichai, who is well aware of how much attention the technology has received, ended his nearly two-hour presentation by asking how many times AI was mentioned in Google's Gemini model. Count: 120, and the count increases by one more when Pichai says “AI” again.

The increased focus on AI will introduce new risks to the internet ecosystem, which relies heavily on digital advertising, the lifeblood of the economy.

Google would be in trouble if AI Overview reduces advertising associated with its search engine, which generated $175 billion in revenue last year alone. And website publishers, from mainstream media outlets to entrepreneurs and startups with a narrower theme focus, are finding that AI summaries are too informative, resulting in fewer clicks on website links, and results are still If it appears in the lower ranks, it will be negatively affected. page.

Based on habits uncovered during the testing phase of Google's AI Overview over the past year, around 25 percent of traffic could be negatively impacted by de-focusing website links, which helps around 5,000 companies. said Mark McCallum, chief innovation officer at Raptive. Website publishers make money from their content.

A drop in traffic of this magnitude could lead to billions of dollars in lost advertising revenue, a devastating blow to AI technology that pulls information from many websites that could potentially lose revenue. It will be.

“The relationship between Google and publishers is pretty symbiotic, but enter AI as well. And essentially what happened is that Big Tech companies used this creative content to train their AI models. That's what we did,” McCallum said. “We are now seeing it being used for its own commercial purposes, in effect a transfer of wealth from small independent companies to Big Tech.”

But Google found that the AI ​​brief resulted in people searching more while testing the technology. “Because suddenly you can ask questions that were previously too difficult,” Liz Reed, who oversees the company's search operations, told The Associated Press in an interview. He declined to provide specific numbers on the volume of link clicks during AI Overview testing.

“The reality is that even when people know what AI is, they still want to click and go to the web,” Reid says. “They want to start with an overview of AI and then dig deeper. We will continue to innovate on what AI is and how to send the most useful traffic to the web.”

Over the past 18 months, the use of AI technology to summarize information in chatbots such as Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT has increased, and service providers are increasingly using copyright protection to evolve their services. Legal questions have already arisen about whether they are illegally extracting from protected material. This is the central claim in the high-profile lawsuit. new york times Late last year, it filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its biggest backer, Microsoft.

Google's AI brief could also lead to lawsuits, especially if the company siphons traffic or ad sales from websites that appear to be unfairly profiting from their content. But as the technology advances and is used by competing services such as ChatGPT and emerging search engines such as Perplexity, this is a risk the company had to take, says Google. said Jim Yu, executive chairman of BrightEdge, which helps companies rank higher.

“This is definitely the next chapter in search,” Yu says. “He seems to be adjusting three key variables simultaneously: the quality of search, the flow of traffic within the ecosystem, and the monetization of that traffic. There hasn't been a bigger moment in search than this in a long time. ”

Outside the amphitheater, dozens of protesters chained themselves together and blocked one of the entrances to the conference. The protesters targeted a US$1.2 billion deal known as “Project Nimbus” to provide artificial intelligence technology to the Israeli government. They claim the system is being deployed lethally in the Gaza war, but Google refutes this claim. The demonstrations do not appear to have affected attendance at the conference or the enthusiasm of the crowd inside.

AP



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