The Big Take
Google Is Searching for an Answer to ChatGPT
Big changes are underway for the internet’s most popular product, and Google (and the web) may never be the same.
One day in 2021, Google’s web search team presented leadership with what was, at the time, a novel proposal: Rather than just have the search engine serve up its familiar list of links, have a chatbot greet visitors at the search results page and offer to answer questions directly. This wasn’t necessarily a shocking idea. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai had been talking for years about redesigning Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, around artificial intelligence, and the organization ran DeepMind and Google Brain, two of the world’s most sophisticated AI labs.