Google is the world's largest search engine, a position that has landed it in hot water with regulators. While the firm's antitrust woes wind their way through the courts, CEO Sundar Pichai is forging ahead with big plans for search. During a recent appearance, Pichai promised Google search will "change profoundly" in the coming year. Given Google's recent infatuation, this almost certainly has something to do with AI.
Pichai made his comments at the New York Times' DealBook Summit on Wednesday. "I think you’ll be surprised, even early in ‘25, the kind of newer things Search can do compared to where it is today," said Pichai.
While Pichai didn't bring up any specific AI-based enhancements to search, he did ruminate on Microsoft's recent AI baiting. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently noted that Google should have been the "default winner" in AI, which is probably true. Google engineers developed the transformer models that underlie all of today's generative AI systems back in 2017. Google did very little with the technology until Microsoft and OpenAI teamed up.
According to Pichai, he'd be happy to put Google's Gemini models up against Microsoft, which doesn't make its own models. Microsoft's Copilot and Bing AI is running on OpenAI's GPT models through a deep partnership with the company that includes billions of dollars in funding for the AI startup.
Since it got serious about AI, Google has released numerous versions of the Gemini models, dropped open source Gemma models, and built Gemini into its latest phones. Search has also gotten some attention in the form of AI Overviews, which try to answer queries by generating text with the company's large language model. AI Overviews are sometimes useful, but like all other forms of this technology, Google says you should verify everything it tells you. Scrolling down further to look at the real search results is a good way to do that.
Ai Overviews
Credit: Google
Pichai calls the company's 2025 plans a "profound shift" but doesn't elaborate on what we can expect. With companies like OpenAI and Perplexity using LLMs for web search operations, it's likely Google will expand the reach of AI Overviews, perhaps featuring a more conversational kind of search that leans on Gemini.
In any case, Google still has to prove its AI is a good way to search the web. Like all other generative AI systems, Gemini doesn't know what's real or fake—it just generates text based on its training data and the input tokens. This leads to frequent "hallucinations," in which the AI confidently states untruths. Google is reportedly working on new versions of Gemini that will compete with the latest from OpenAI and others, but many past promises of vast improvements in AI have not come to pass. If Google's 2025 advances are going to rely on AI, Google's got to do better.