Google showcased its latest advances in AI search Wednesday at a live event in Paris, but the features pale in comparison to Microsoft’s announcement yesterday of the “new Bing,” which the company has extensively demonstrated to the press and to which limited public access is provided.
In perhaps the most interesting demo, Google showed how it will use generative AI to summarize information from the Internet in the future. In the demo, the company showed a query for the question “what are the best constellations to look for when stargazing?” with an AI-generated response highlighting some key options and how to spot them.
“New generative AI features will help us organize complex information and multiple viewpoints directly into search results,” said Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan. “It allows you to quickly understand the big picture and then explore different angles.”
Raghavan referred to this kind of response as a “NORA” answer – which stands for “no one good answer”. (A common criticism of AI-generated search responses is that they tend to pick one answer as final.) He didn’t specify when this feature would be available.
The lack of information points to Google’s current problems with search. While the company is a leader in AI and has been slowly weaving AI features into search for years, it has yet to launch a direct competitor to conversational ChatGPT. It announced its rival service, Bard, on Monday, but the system is currently only being tested in closed beta, with greater public availability promised sometime “in the coming weeks.”
At today’s event, Google also gave a short demo of Bard, asking the chatbot questions about the pros and cons of buying an electric car. You can see the sample answers below:
Meanwhile, Microsoft has benefited from Google’s caution. Yesterday it announced new AI-assisted features for Bing and its Edge browser. These include a general-purpose chatbot similar to ChatGPT, as well as auto-summarizing and copywriting tools.