Google Thinks It Can Cash In on Generative AI. Microsoft Already Has

[ Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is confident that Google will find a way to make money selling access to generative AI tools. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says his company is already doing it. Both companies reported better-than-expected quarterly sales and profit on Thursday. And the stock prices of both soared on the results, with Alphabet … Read more

Perplexity’s Founder Was Inspired by Sundar Pichai. Now They’re Competing to Reinvent Search

[ Aravind Srinivas credits Google CEO Sundar Pichai for giving him the freedom to eat eggs. Srinivas remembers the moment seven years ago when an interview with Pichai popped up in his YouTube feed. His vegetarian upbringing in India had excluded eggs, as it had for many in the country, but now, in his early … Read more

Apple’s MM1 AI Model Shows a Sleeping Giant Is Waking Up

[ While the tech industry went gaga for generative artificial intelligence, one giant has held back: Apple. The company has yet to introduce so much as an AI-generated emoji, and according to a New York Times report today and earlier reporting from Bloomberg, it is in preliminary talks with Google about adding the search company’s … Read more

Google Is Finally Trying to Kill AI Clickbait

[ Google is taking action against algorithmically-generated spam. The search engine giant just announced upcoming changes, including a revamped spam policy, designed to keep AI clickbait out of its search results. “It sounds like it’s going to be one of the biggest updates in the history of Google,” says Lily Ray, senior director of SEO … Read more

Gemini Advanced Is a Central Part of Google’s Subscription Future

[ Google got to where it is mostly by offering free services stuffed with ads, but it has increasingly experimented with a different business model: selling subscriptions for extra perks. Its first subscription offering, debuted in 2006, provided additional photo storage for users who didn’t want to have to hit the delete button. You can … Read more

Google Prepares for a Future Where Search Isn’t King

[ Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai still loves the web. He wakes up every morning and reads Techmeme, a news aggregator resplendent with links, accessible only via the web. The web is dynamic and resilient, he says, and can still—with help from a search engine—provide whatever information a person is looking for. Yet the web and … Read more

Google Rebrands Its AI Chatbot as Gemini to Take On ChatGPT

[ When OpenAI’s ChatGPT opened a new era in tech, the industry’s former AI champ, Google, responded by reorganizing its labs and launching a profusion of sometimes overlapping AI services. This included the Bard chatbot, workplace helper Duet AI, and a chatbot-style version of search. Now Google is consolidating many of its generative AI products … Read more

Confessions of an AI Clickbait Kingpin

[ “I’m not a fan of AI,” Nebojša Vujinović Vujo says. The admission surprises me: He has built a bustling business by snapping up abandoned news outlets and other websites and stuffing them full of algorithmically generated articles. Although he accepts that his model rankles writers and readers alike, he says he’s simply embracing an … Read more

Google Circle to Search and AI-Powered Multi-Search Coming to Mobile

[ In recent years Google has used the word “helpful” to describe new features added to its search product, its voice assistant, its generative AI tool Bard, even its Pixel earbuds. A keyword-search for the word “helpful” in Google’s own corporate news blog brings up more than 1,200 results. Depending on what you’re searching for, … Read more