[ 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’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
[ 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
[ “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
[ 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
[ Increasing talk of artificial intelligence developing with potentially dangerous speed is hardly slowing things down. A year after OpenAI launched ChatGPT and triggered a new race to develop AI technology, Google today revealed an AI project intended to reestablish the search giant as the world leader in AI. Gemini, a new type of AI … Read more
[ China’s leading search engine, Baidu, has entered the fray to take on Tesla and a clutch of domestic smart electric car makers through a new partnership with vehicle manufacturer Geely. Baidu, which already runs one of the world’s largest open autonomous-driving platforms, plans to use Geely’s production facilities and development capabilities to reinforce its … Read more
