• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 3, 2023

Google plans to bring AI-like features to search similar to the large language-model technology in ChatGPT, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during the company’s Q4 2022 earnings call Thursday.

“In the coming weeks and months, we’ll make these language models available, starting with LaMDA, so that people can engage directly with them,” Pichai said.

Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) and the technology behind OpenAI ChatGPT are types of neural networks that can act like the underlying architecture of the brain. They are fed vast amounts of information and learn how to generate conversational sentences with somewhat accuracy.

Pichai explained how chatbot technology would integrate into Google.

“Very soon, people will be able to interact directly with our newest, most powerful language models as a companion to search in experimental and innovative ways,” he said.

In search, Pichai said language models like Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Multitask Unified Model (MUM) have improved searches for four years, enabling significant ranking improvements and multimodal search like Google Nets.

“Very soon, people will be able to interact directly with our newest, most powerful language models as a companion to Search in experimental and innovative ways,” he said.

Pichai also pointed to Alphabet's UK-based AI unit DeepMind, saying its database of “all 200m proteins known to science have been used by 1 million biologists around the world.”

The plan is to launch more labs product and beta features, but the serving costs will need to be improved. The company plans to make APIs available for developers and enterprises, and integrate more direct large language model types of experiences in search.

There have been other reports of search companies integrating large language models like ChatGPT into search.

Baidu, the leading Chinese search engine, plans to launch an AI chatbot service in March, similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT. The technology will launch as a stand-alone application and slowly integrate into the Baidu search engine.

Microsoft's $1 billion return on investment in OpenAI -- which created the ChatGPT technology -- could pay off for brands advertising in its search engine, Bing. Reed Albergotti explains that it is not just ChatGPT from OpenAI being integrated into Bing Search, but a faster version named GPT-4.

“OpenAI's latest software responds much faster than the current version, and the replies sound more human and are more detailed,” Albergotti explains, citing people familiar with the product and rollout plans.

The ad-free search engine Neeva will release an update that allows its bot to respond to questions with conversational text.

And BrightEdge already uses some components of the GPT technology in its platform Autopilot.