Google’s annual conference, I/O, has come to an end with top executives gathering for a global media interview. The attendees included Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, Elizabeth Reid, Vice President and General Manager of Google Search, James Manyika, Senior Vice President of Google Research, Technology, and Society, and Koray Kavukcuoglu, Chief Technology Officer of Google Deepmind. They all play important roles in leading AI development.
In the face of strong competitors like OpenAI, Google emphasized its long-term investments and the influence of hundreds of millions of users. Regarding concerns about the impact of the AI features launched by the search engine on website traffic, Google expressed confidence in maintaining a balance. “Digital Times” went to the scene and witnessed Google’s top executives answering questions from various industries.
Regarding competition: What is Google’s view on the relentless pursuit of OpenAI and the slowing down of responsible AI development?
The AI battle between tech giants continues to heat up, with Microsoft’s Open AI even announcing the GPT-4o with multimodal capabilities the day before Google’s annual conference, indicating a clear competition.
In response, Pichai said, “We are pleased to see the innovation from other companies. It benefits everyone, so I am as excited as all of you. This has been an exciting week in the tech industry.” However, he then mentioned that an event happening in the tech industry today may become less important over time, emphasizing Google’s long-term investments and efforts to change the lives of billions of people. This implies that Google is not focused on current competition but rather on a larger scale.
The competition between Google and OpenAI has been ongoing since the end of 2022, with both companies announcing new products at similar times. Recently, The New York Times pointed out that OpenAI’s audiovisual generation model, Sora, has been trained using over one million hours of YouTube videos. When asked about this controversy in an interview with CNBC on the 14th, Pichai simply responded, “I think that’s a question they need to answer. Typically, when something like this happens, we make sure they understand our terms of service, and we resolve the issue.”
In addition to external challenges, there were also questions about Google’s own competitiveness. It was pointed out that Google has placed a strong emphasis on being responsible and reducing AI hallucinations from last year to this year. However, in the fiercely competitive AI field, how can Google ensure that it does not fall behind?
“We want to be bold but also make choices,” emphasized Pichai. Responsibility is not just about regulations; it can also drive innovation. For example, Google is investing in tools that benefit humanity, such as flood forecasts, medical professional models, and inclusive design. These developments go hand in hand with Google’s AI development.
Regarding the search engine: Will AI summaries reduce website traffic?
Google officially launched the AI Overview feature on its search engine this year, which uses AI to search and summarize content for users at the top of the page. There are concerns that this will affect the effectiveness of advertisements and the traffic of creators and publishers. Research firm Gartner predicts that due to the increasing reliance on AI overall, network traffic in search engines will decrease by 25% by 2026.
Paul Roetzer, CEO of the Marketing AI Institute, believes that this will definitely have a negative impact on websites that rely on organic search traffic. “Marketers have no choice but to continue doing what they are doing and try to attract attention outside of Google search.”
In response, Elizabeth emphasized that AI-assisted summaries and traffic are not a “zero-sum game.” In fact, they found that the websites displayed in AI Overviews saw an increase in traffic during their testing process. “People usually assume that the number of problems in the world is fixed, but in reality, when people search for a question, they become curious about the answer and continue to explore further.”
Pichai also added that Google had already launched the “Featured Snippets” feature in 2014, which displays search results prominently at the top of the page. It was also questioned at the time, but over time, it has been proven that website traffic has increased. This indicates their confidence in maintaining this balance.
Regarding goals: Making AI understand the world more like humans
The AI field is constantly changing, and the media asked about future prospects, focusing on what will happen in the next 12 months. In response, Kavukcuoglu believes that Google’s core mission in the coming year is to make AI engage in more human-like and complex reasoning.
“We are currently in a phase where generative models can create new ideas and make assumptions, but reasoning through these things is a more challenging task,” Kavukcuoglu pointed out. Google’s goal is to enable people to interact with these models, even allowing technology to act as their “agents” to carry out tasks. However, all of these require AI to have a comprehensive understanding of the entire background environment and the world as seen by the user.
The direction of Google’s development can be seen from the recently announced intelligent assistant, Astra. When Astra uses a camera to see the same view as the user, it can think and respond in real-time as if it is experiencing the world together. This is an important step in Google’s development.
Edited by Li Xiantai