Google will use artificial intelligence to return summary answers to US users’ search engine queries as it continues to infuse generative AI into its most used products.
The company has been testing “AI summaries” that appear at the top of search results, summaries created by its Gemini AI model that appear alongside traditional link-based search results.
The feature was also tested in the UK, but will roll out in the US starting Tuesday, Google announced at its annual I/O developers conference Tuesday in California. Google search chief Liz Reid said AI Overviews would be available to “more than a billion people” by the end of the year.
Google also announced a text-to-video AI model called Veo, which enables the creation of computer-generated images based solely on written prompts. The model is a clear rival to OpenAI’s Sora, which performs similar functions and is scheduled for public release later this year.
Google also revealed a new AI assistant in progress under the tentative name Project Astra, showing a preview version of the voice tool that can use a smartphone’s camera to verbally identify locations, read and explain computer codes, and create sentences. alliterative
The assistant was shown to journalists in a video demonstration and showed the tool interacting by voice with a Google employee, using the camera lens to identify the view from a window (the King’s Cross area of London, where it is based Google’s artificial intelligence unit) and understand computer code. Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said the tool was “pretty magical,” and that Google is aiming for its debut in the second half of this year.
The company said its overview feature would be able to handle complex questions such as finding Pilates studios in the US city of Boston, showing their best prices and their walking times from a specific location, all in a single query. Using Gemini technology, Google will begin the response with an AI-generated summary, which it then links to other content, including web links.
The Veo demo showed filmmaker and actor Donald Glover praising the model as generations of AI appeared on the screen like a sailboat gliding across the sea. “Everyone is going to be a director,” Glover said. “And everyone should be.”
Concern about AI-generated images replacing the work of filmmakers and entertainment industry workers has been a major labor rights issue in recent years. Some of the country’s most prominent entertainment unions, such as Sag-Aftra, have gone on strike on issues including how studios are allowed to use AI. After watching OpenAI’s Sora earlier this year, filmmaker and studio owner Tyler Perry also announced that was putting on hold the expansion of an $800 million study.
The updates were announced a day after OpenAI, the developer of the ChatGPT chatbot, announced a new model called GPT-4o that can interact with people using voice. The model will be a free version of OpenAI’s GPT-4 AI model, which was previously a paid product.
The AI overview, which the company described as “removing more of the legwork of search,” will appear when Google’s systems decide that such a response may be useful, for example, when responding to a query that requires gathering information from a variety of sources. . Google indicated that the overview feature will roll out to other countries in the coming months and said it will reach “more than a billion people by the end of the year.”
Google said the traditional search format still appeared to benefit from the AI-generated approach, with web links proving even more popular in tests.
“We see that the links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query,” the company said. Amid publisher concerns that news-related queries will receive AI-generated responses and not links to original journalism, Google said it would “continue to focus on sending valuable traffic to publishers and creators.”
Google also announced a faster version of its Gemini model, called 1.5 Flash, and an updated version of its image generator model. This year, Pichai said some images taken by Gemini were “biased” and “completely unacceptable” after the model returned results that included depictions of German soldiers in World War II as people of color.