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 its critical search layer are changing. We can all see it happening: Social media apps, short-form video, and generative AI are challenging our outdated ideals of what it means to find information online. Quality information online. Pichai sees it, too. But he has more power than most to steer it. The way Pichai is rolling out Gemini, Google’s most powerful AI model yet, suggests that much as he likes the good ol’ web, he’s much more interested in a futuristic version of it. He has to be: The chatbots are coming for him. Today Google announced that the chatbot it launched to counter OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Bard, is getting a new name: Gemini, like the AI model it’s based on that was first unveiled in December. The Gemini chatbot is also going mobile, and inching away from its “experimental” phase and closer to general availability. It will have its own app on Android and prime placement in the Google search app on iOS. And the most advanced version of Gemini will also be offered as part of a $20 per month Google One subscription package. In releasing the most powerful version of Gemini with a paywall, Google is taking direct aim at the fast-ascendant ChatGPT and the subscription service ChatGPT Plus. Pichai is also experimenting with a new vision for what Google offers—not replacing search, not yet, but building an alternative to see what sticks.
Full interview : Sundar Pichai on the evolving web, training Gemini to be a multimodal AI, future paid and ad-supported generative AI, hallucinations, and more.
