‘Unlock the Power of AI with Google!’

Google’s dominance as the leading search engine is facing an unprecedented challenge, yet the company’s global policy chief assured AFP that it maintains an advantage over its artificial intelligence rivals.

Kent Walker played down the idea that viral AI chatbots like ChatGPT could challenge Google’s crown, pointing out that his company had spent the past decade integrating AI into its products.

“It’s important to understand that artificial intelligence is much more than just a chatbot,” he said in an interview Wednesday in Malaga, southern Spain, where Google is opening its biggest cybersecurity center in Europe.

He said AI is changing the way we do science and emphasized that anyone who has used Google Maps, Translate, Gmail or search recently has benefited from AI.

“We’ve been using artificial intelligence for power searching for a dozen years,” he said.

“We’re looking for new ways to use generative AI tools to expand the different ways we search.”

Type Microsoft

A year ago, the launch of Californian OpenAI company ChatGPT fired the public imagination with the idea of generative artificial intelligence – computer programs that can create content with just a few instructions.

Microsoft, already a supporter of OpenAI, increased its support to billions of dollars and began spreading AI dust over its search engine Bing.

Early reviews were good and suddenly, for the first time this century, Google seemed to have a real competitor.

Google quickly announced its own chatbot – named Bard in honor of William Shakespeare – and Walker admitted that the rapid development of chatbots had affected his company.

“I would say the rise of AI chatbots accelerated our work and expanded the general acceptance of AI in a more visible way, and we’ve doubled down on our work,” he said.

“Always Balance”

But Google is no longer a bold startup. It is a sprawling trillion-dollar global entity with many divisions and stakeholders.

More recently, it has become a more attention-grabbing cautious approach to new technology rather than pushing the boundaries.

And Walker, who joined Google in 2006 and leads its legal and policy teams, chose his words carefully about the potential for artificial intelligence to disrupt the search engine market.

“It’s always a balance because some of these new AI tools aren’t always as accurate as traditional search,” he said.

AI tools like ChatGPT have been known to invent details of people’s lives, cite fake academic papers, or pass off their own creations as fact.

“So we need to make sure we’re using our traditional search experience to ground the results into accurate, authoritative information,” Walker said.

“So we’re combining AI with search—what we call search generation—to get the best of both worlds.”

However, Google’s current difficulties go beyond AI competition.

A high-profile lawsuit in the US is investigating its dominance in the search market.

One of the most damaging revelations has been that Google is paying Apple billions to ensure it remains the default engine for its products.

Walker was coy, however, saying the case has given his company an opportunity to demonstrate that users choose Google “because they want to, not because they have to.”

He said Google was working with other platforms to make it easier for users to find their products.

“We hope the court will accept this,” he said. – It will probably be resolved in the spring of next year.