Google CEO Sundar Pichai says the company will integrate AI chatbot technology into its regular search features, though won't say if it will use its error-prone Bard system.
Microsoft's integration of ChatGPT into Bing has at least raised the profile of that search engine, even if it has come with problems. Despite those issues, the company is all-in on Chat AI, and is now also adding it to Microsoft 365.
According to a Wall Street Journal interview with Sundar Pichai, Google is following suit, at least as far as integrating a Chat AI system into its search. Pichai did not mention Bard, but instead spoke more generally of Large Language Models (LLMs) which drive such systems.
"Will people be able to ask questions to Google and engage with LLMs in the context of search? Absolutely," he said. "The opportunity space, if anything, is bigger than before."
Pichai did not comment on when such an integration would be launched. Google has been using LLMs and AI-powered tools in its searching, but previously as a back-end system rather than something users could interact with directly.
Following the breakout success of ChatGPT, Google did reveal its own Bard system. Its very first demo of Bard, though, returned a factually inaccurate result.
Since then, Google has even had to refute how its own Bard system falsely and controversially claimed to be trained using Google's own Gmail.