Google is putting AI technology into virtually all of its most popular products, including search, in an effort to reclaim its place as the leader in AI. The new generative AI applications could supercharge Google’s products and give better productivity and creativity tools to the masses, but the technology is also prone to error and bias, which could damage Google’s core mission to serve its users reliable information. The most meaningful change to Google’s search engine is the new, more visual Google search experience, which is more conversational, more natural, and better at answering complicated questions than regular search. The new search experience can help people with everything from planning a vacation to answering complex questions about the news of the day. Google’s AI search runs, in part, on a new, underlying technical model called PaLM2, which is better at language, reasoning, and code, and can run more quickly. Google has trained the new AI search engine to be less risky than its experimental AI chatbot, Bard, which generated incorrect or made-up answers. Google’s new AI search engine will not answer queries when it’s not confident about the trustworthiness of its sources or when it comes to certain subject matters, including medical dosage advice, information about self-harm, and developing news events. Google is gathering feedback from users, and the company emphasized that its still being refined as it gets rolled out through Google’s new experimental search product group, Search Labs. Some Google employees have been outspoken about concerns that the company is rushing these public AI experiments.
