Google announces new AI search feature

Welcome back to the Exchange. Google's annual developer conference is underway in Mountain View. CEO Sundar Pichai giving the keynote right now. Deirdre Bosa is outside with the big headline so far. Deirdre. Yeah, that's right. We can hear the cheers coming from inside the Amphitheatre. Right beside me. Sundar Pichai, as you said, took the stage. He's still on there right now and I think probably the biggest announcement so far. We're still early. Sundar Pichai said that the company is launching AI overviews in search across the US this week. Kelly, you and I have talked about this. This is previously known as search generative experience. So this is search with AI Generative AI added to it. So it's no longer the 10 blue links that you typically see from a traditional search, but they're actually incorporating AI to all users in America. So search is going to look very different for everyone in the US by the end of this week. And he says that they're going to roll that out to more countries throughout the year. Another headline that came out, he said that over a million people have signed up to try Gemini over the last three months. Gemini is it's more pure form chat bot like a GPT for like a perplexity, more of an answer machine. And I just want to note that 1,000,000 people in three months, compare that to what we saw from ChatGPT within two months of launch back in 2022, they made it to 100 million monthly active users. So again, you see that Google is moving slowly, but they do have that huge distribution, that huge scale advantage and likely kicking off a new kind of race here if they're making generative AI available right in search. Starting this week, we're getting some more demos as well, including workspace. He just introduced the idea of AI agents. That's what we saw from ChatGPT that kind of front ran IO yesterday. The idea that we're moving out of this era of chat bots into an era of AI agents that can emote, that can reason, that can have a back and forth conversation. So Kelly, I'm going to tune back in. We see the head of AI, Demis Hassabis, taking the stage right now to find out more about what Google's AI agent is going to look like. Dear Jeff, I could just steal two more seconds. And thank you first of all for pointing out the SGE thing, which now, as you said, they're calling AI overview. Got it. But you also asked a very good question the other day when we were because I said I liked it as a user experience. But you said how many ads am I seeing? The answer was not many. How big of a of a problem is that? Or how much more could the user experience change if Google has to integrate more ads? So I think that is still an open question and that's why Google is not rolling out Gemini to everyone, because Gemini doesn't really have ads. It's that AI overview or SGE where executives have said that they can place ads above and below those generative AI answers. And I think it's still unclear where that's going to go. If that's going to go now below the fold, how does the business model change with that? That's why maybe you know they put Gemini behind another wall. 1,000,000 users have signed up versus 100 million monthly active users for ChatGPT within two months. There's a difference there and can Google when using its strategy by keeping the ad model within a generative AI world. Right. And you think about well could people just pay to be kind of the sponsored answer or kind of point you. But then it compromises the quality which is kind of their whole stuff is useful exactly. I can't wait to see how they try to see this. May not even be this may not even be a this may be backwards looking, because what we're seeing right now are voice agents. We're not typing anything in. So true. We're not gonna see the links anywhere. We're going to hear a chat bot answer us. That's where we're moving. Raises more questions about that model. Excellent.