On Thursday’s quarterly earnings call, Google worked to reassure investors and analysts that it was a leader in AI development. The company’s Q4 2022 results were highly anticipated as investors and the tech industry awaited Google’s response to the popularity of his ChatGPT for OpenAI.
During the call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai discussed the company’s plans to make AI-based Large Language Models (LLMs) like LaMDA available in the coming weeks and months. Pichai said users will soon be able to use large language models as search companions. LLM, like ChatGPT, is a deep learning algorithm that can recognize, summarize, and generate text and other content based on knowledge from vast amounts of text data. Pichai says models that are ready for users are particularly good for creating, building, and summarizing.
“Now that we can integrate a more direct LLM-type experience into search, we think it will help us expand and offer new types of use cases, generative use cases,” said Pichai. “So we see this as an opportunity to rethink, rethink, and drive search to solve more use cases for our users. And you’ll find that you’re getting feedback, iterating, and improving things.”
Pichai’s comments about ChatGPT’s potential rival come from a report this week that revealed that Microsoft is working to incorporate a faster version of ChatGPT, known as GPT-4, into Bing. It has a fraction of the search market share and is competitive with Google. Due to the popularity of ChatGPT, Google is reportedly reaching out to co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin for help in combating potential threats. The New York Times recently reported that Page and Brin had several meetings with executives to strategize the company’s AI plans.
In a call, Pichai warned investors and analysts that he sees the technology as having to scale slowly and that many language uses are still in the “nascent stage.” He also said that the company is developing AI with a deep sense of responsibility and will be careful when releasing AI-based products. That’s because the company plans to release beta features first and scale up gradually from there.
He went on to say that Google will provide new tools and APIs for developers, creators and partners to build their own applications and discover new possibilities for AI.
Additionally, Google has announced that it will change the reporting structure of the DeepMind AI segment starting in Q1 2023. This segment will now be reported as part of Alphabet’s corporate costs rather than being reported under other betting umbrellas, including long payoff projects. Ruth Porat, her CFO at Alphabet, said the changes to the report “reflect her DeepMind’s strategic focus on supporting each of our segments.”
The move also aims to let the industry know that the company is serious about investing in the advancing field of AI.
Shortly after the call, the tech giant revealed that it will host a search and AI event on February 8th. It makes finding what you need more natural and intuitive than ever before.” The invitation also includes tips for Google Maps, Lens, shopping and translation.
Google usually shares updates on maps, lenses, and other similar products at its I/O conference in May, which makes this new surprise event interesting. That’s a few days away, so Google appears to be focused on addressing threats to its core business, seemingly reassuring investors that the company is still an ‘AI first’ company. is.
“AI is the deepest technology we are working on right now,” Pichai said on a conference call. “Our talented researchers, infrastructure and technology put us in a very strong position when AI reaches an inflection point. We have been leading the development of AI since then.We are only at the beginning of the AI journey and the best is yet to come,” he said. Told.
Another new development that shows Google’s focus on AI is the news that it is investing $300 million in AI startup Anthropic. The news was first reported by the Financial Times, with Google confirming its investment in TechCrunch on Friday.Anthropic’s recently debuted AI model Claude is seen as a rival to ChatGPT. The new funding will value the San Francisco-based company at about $5 billion. The news comes when Microsoft recently announced a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI.
During the call, Pichai reiterated that Google has been investing in AI for several years.
While this is true, the company hasn’t made much noticeable progress in this area. For example, the company had an AI Playground application that could have been like ChatGPT, but was intentionally limited. The company also unveiled his AI language model called PaLM, which stands for Pathways Language Model, at his I/O last year. This is the company’s largest model to date, but Google has yet to reveal its plans or how it will be used.
Despite Google’s assurances, investors are now watching closely how the search giant responds to the looming threat posed by ChatGPT. Alphabet shares opened lower today after the company posted disappointing fourth-quarter results, but the company had recovered all its losses by noon.
