Google ramps up AI features in search engine
HighlightsGoogle announced a new AI mode for its search engine that allows users to ask longer and more complex queries, enhancing the search experience beyond traditional links and advertisements. Concerns have been raised by analysts and website publishers about the potential decline in Google's advertising revenue as the search engine shifts towards AI-generated summaries, which could reduce user traffic to external websites. At its annual developers conference, Google revealed its most advanced AI tools would be available in a new 'Ultra' subscription tier costing $250 monthly, highlighting the company's focus on monetizing its AI innovations.
Google
on Tuesday said it was beefing up online searches with even more generative artificial intelligence, as it presses on with embracing AI despite fears for its ad-based business model.
CEO
Sundar Pichai
, speaking at the company's annual developers event, said that Google's search engine would feature a new AI mode, as he boasted that "decades of research" were reaching fruition with the new technology.
The search engine's new AI mode goes further than the already launched AI Overviews which display answers to queries from the company's
generative AI
powers, above the traditional blue links to websites and ads.
"New AI mode is a total reimagining of search with more advanced reasoning," said Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, kicking off the tech giant's annual developers' conference in Silicon Valley.
"You can ask longer and more complex queries... and you can go further with follow up questions."
Google head of search Liz Reid described the freshly unveiled AI mode, which is now available in the US, as a powerful tool with advanced reasoning, multi-modality, and the ability for users to dive deeper into searches.
"It searches across the entire web, going way deeper than the traditional search," she said.
Since Google debuted Generative AI Overviews in search results at its developers conference a year ago, it has grown to more than 1.5 billion users in a wide array of countries, according to Pichai.
"That means
Google search
is bringing Gen AI to more people than any other product in the world," Pichai said.
"As people use AI Overviews, they're increasingly happier with their results and they search more often in our biggest markets, like the US and India."
Analysts have expressed concerns that shifting away from pages of "blue links" to AI-generated summaries in Google search would mean fewer opportunities to serve up money-making ads at the heart of the company's business model.
This has also caused alarm among website publishers, such as news organisations or Wikipedia, who face a massive drop in traffic with the potential demise of Google search links that have been the main gateway to the internet for the past two decades.
Fueling those concerns, Apple executive Eddy Cue testified in federal court recently that Google's search traffic on Apple devices declined in April for the first time in over two decades.
Cue, Apple's senior vice president of services, told the Washington antitrust trial that Google was losing ground to AI alternatives like ChatGPT and Perplexity, sending Google's shares plummeting.
Investors were also unsettled when Cue added that Apple might soon offer AI alternatives as default search options on its devices, heightening concerns that Google's
advertising revenue
could face serious threats from AI competitors.
The testimony came during a pivotal trial where a federal judge could decide that Google needs to sell off key businesses in order to satisfy a previous ruling that its search engine is an illegal monopoly.
'Ultra'
At its annual developers conference, Google nurtures relationships with creators of apps, platforms or online services, hoping to keep them inspired to sync with the tech firm's offerings.
The gathering this year spotlighted AI innovations Google is putting into people's hands as well as some still being crafted by researchers.
That work included AI being used for real-time speech translation, trying on clothes virtually using one's own photos, and having the technology watch for desired items to be attractively priced in order to buy them at the right time.
In the latest buzz about the technology, AI can act as an "agent" tending to online tasks instead of humans.
Google is starting to bring agent capabilities to Chrome and the Gemini AI app, launching first to those paying for subscriptions, according to executives.
"All of this will keep getting better," Pichai said.
"It's made the Web itself more exciting; people are engaging a lot more across the board."
Google announced that its most advanced AI tools would be accessible in an "Ultra" subscription tier costing $250 monthly.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Hindustan Times
16 minutes ago
- Hindustan Times
Main accused in 91 cr Q Phone App fraud arrested
THANE: In a major breakthrough in the ₹91-crore 'Q Phone App' fraud, the Thane police have arrested Parag Ashok Kumar Shah, one of the main accused in the case. After months of ducking law enforcers, Shah was arrested from Narayangaon near Pune on Wednesday, and has been remanded to police custody till June 11. He is the third individual to be arrested in the case. The elaborate Ponzi scam, which defrauded 120 investors with promises of high returns through a fake digital investment model, was perpetrated under the banner of a company named 'Q Phone App'. Investors were led to believe that Q Phone App developed applications for Google. They were promised substantial returns in US dollars through revenue generated from digital advertisements. The fraud took place between May 2020 and January 2024, and operated across many states. The case was registered at Vartak Nagar police station in Thane under Sections 406 (criminal breach of trust), 409 (criminal breach of trust by public servant or banker), 420 (cheating), 34 (common intent) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and sections of the Maharashtra Protection of Interests of Depositors (MPID) Act. The Economic Offences Wing (EOW), Thane, which is investigating the case, suspects that the number of victims and the total defrauded sum will rise as more people come forward. A senior police officer said Parag Ashok Kumar Shah was a small businessman from Narayangaon. He met some businessmen from Gujarat and they committed the crime together. 'The group took money in cash and used it for personal gain,' he said.
New Indian Express
41 minutes ago
- New Indian Express
How your AI usage is impacting the environment
Meanwhile, companies are not required to disclose how much energy or water their AI systems use. They focus more on business metrics — speed, accuracy, and ROI. Rahul laments, 'The general public and policymakers are not aware of the effects of AI on the environment. They can't connect the dots about how generating one image or asking one question can affect the environment.' However, there's also a push toward efficiency. 'Companies are now looking at using low-power chips, better parallelism, and optimised training techniques,' states Rijin. Solutions ahead AI engineers and developers are looking for the blind spot and are trying to find solutions to solve the environmental puzzle. With AI, a general rule of thumb is: the bigger the model, the better the performance. Hence, the next-generation accelerators like NVIDIA's Blackwell series and Google's TPU v5 deliver up to twice the performance per watt compared to the previous generation. 'That improvement can cut the electricity needed for a given training run by 30 to 40 percent,' shares Harsh. At the same time, software techniques like model quantisation help reduce computation without sacrificing accuracy. 'When you combine those hardware and software gains, the energy needed per training job has dropped, but only partially. Model sizes and dataset scales continue to grow, so total consumption remains high,' adds the entrepreneur. While amends are being made for the future, the present is still in crisis. G Sundarrajan, an environmental activist with Poovulagin Nanbargal, says, 'AI has an impact on climate and global warming. People might say it is not direct. But the power consumption results in carbon emissions. We are talking about mitigating carbon emissions, and when you set up a data centre as a backbone, you need more power, which means you build more thermal power plants and more carbon emissions and more destruction.' As a solution to this rippling effect, Sowmya Dutta, trustee of Movement for Advancing Understanding of Sustainability and Mutuality (MAUSAM), suggests the government intervene. He mentions, 'The government should take recognition, and demand that the number of searches are brought down to a manageable energy level. There could be better algorithms to do this.' He adds that a policy should ensure that the energy utilised and released should be 'non-carbon, at least non-impactful waste.' Even before the government could step in, service providers are increasingly switching to renewables, air-cooling, and certified circular-economy recycling. While AI contributes to environmental challenges, it's also part of the solution by improving efficiency and reducing its impact. In Europe, some enterprise clients now ask about energy use and compliance with green standards, a step towards a less-destructive future. 'AI is being used to optimise cooling systems in data centres, predict energy loads, and even design more efficient chips. There's a kind of circular benefit here — AI can help monitor and reduce its own impact, if we design it with that goal in mind,' concludes Rijin. While you might be mindful of the water usage at home, consciously switch off lights and fans when not in use, and try to reduce your carbon footprint, you might still be contributing to environmental damage. From this World Environment Day, make it a point to pause before you ask the bots to write your assignments, help you get on an Instagram trend, or aid in coping with personal struggles, and reflect on the harm you might be causing.
Hindustan Times
an hour ago
- Hindustan Times
What next for Apple's AI, OpenAI's funding impetus, and an impressive Noise Tag 1
The annual Apple WWDC keynote is next week. You may have heard the rumours about significant redesign and naming scheme changes for iOS, iPadOS and so on. My hunch goes beyond the clickbait and 140 character attention spans. Apple, trying to overcome a deficit that's still increasing every week (the upgraded Siri remains delayed), will reconfigure its Apple Intelligence plans. As consumers, you and I may only see the changes on the interface layer, but my belief is, there's more to that story. I don't foresee any AI company acquisitions, but more on the lines of exclusivity driven core partnerships. There are three names that, I feel, might play a big role. Perplexity, which already has deals in place with Samsung and Motorola to integrate their AI in upcoming phones, could have something to offer Apple as well. It will certainly be more than just a search plug-in, if that partnership has to fructify. Could that means Perplexity's agentic browser plans, intersect with Safari, for instance? Very much a chance of that happening. Case in point, Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of services saying during the Google antitrust trial that, 'We've been pretty impressed with what Perplexity has done, so we've started some discussions with them about what they're doing.' Secondly, Google itself stands to lose a little if Samsung (being by far the largest Android phone OEM) reduces reliance on Gemini which itself has received significant updates recently, with the Perplexity partnership. The ideal recourse would be to find a way to give Gemini a home on the iPhone, beyond the app. Not to be forgotten, is Apple and Google's search partnership. And to that point, it has been noted in the recent antitrust trial that traditional searches are reducing, for the first time, via Safari. That's because of AI, and Gemini is better positioned than anyone else to realign its placement within Safari and Apple's broader OSes. The upgraded Siri, for that matter, alongside OpenAI's GPT search? And finally, Anthropic. With the latest Claude models being touted for their coding skills (as are many others, increasingly so), might find a place behind-the-scenes. Apple's code writing tool for developers, called Xcode, could do well with a Claude layering. Reminds me of Microsoft's Satya Nadella saying recently that, 'maybe 20 to 30 percent of the code that is inside of our repos today in some of our projects are probably all written by software.' That may be a poignant quote, particularly for Apple that missed the AI train the last time, and wouldn't want to do so ahead of the next big chapter. And whichever AI company finds the best partnership alignment with Apple in 2025, stands to gain the most. With things the way they are in the AI space, that'll be a race to the top. We'll most certainly chat about this next week. With every new artificial intelligence (AI) model, inevitably come the claims that they're the best ever at what they do. And that they're better than every rival. When Anthropic released Claude 4 a week ago, the artificial intelligence (AI) company said these models set 'new standards for coding, advanced reasoning, and AI agents'. They cite leading scores on SWE-bench Verified, a benchmark for performance on real software engineering tasks. OpenAI also claims the o3 and o4-mini models return best scores on certain benchmarks. As does Mistral, for its latest, open-source Devstral coding model. It is a common theme, not limited to this troika of AI companies. I talked about the need for 'AI benchmarks' to evolve quickly, else we risk running into the same sort of scenario that unfolded in the PC and smartphone space for years — where one metric (such as processor GHz speeds) fallaciously defined the worth of a product. The Apple AirTag has, irrespective of whatever competition may claim, has remained the most accurate tracker for all things easy to forget and for tracking luggage during your travels. The universal applicability is such, you've to really hide this in your luggage, because thieves know what to search for, and throw it into the nearest bin (or canal). Many have made an Apple AirTag rival in recent years, but none have had the sort of accuracy or consistency. Noise, a company that I've often noted is on a premiumisation trajectory, recently sent something called the Tag 1 Smart Tracker. Priced at ₹1,499 at this time, it's available in Charcoal, Midnight and Ivory colours. It is compatible with Apple Find My network on the iPhone and the Android Find My Device service for Android devices. I was able to seamlessly set up both. In the Find My app on an iPhone, for instance, the Noise Tag 1 shows up just as an AirTag would. The location accuracy and refresh window, seems to be very similar to the AirTag — I had both in the same travel bag, for an even-kneeled comparison. If I left that luggage behind at the hotel when heading out for briefings and the keynote, the Noise Tag 1 generated a notification on the phone that the linked piece of luggage had been left behind, with the location details. In this instance, there was nothing to worry, but clearly the Noise Tag 1 is on the job rather seamlessly. There is a way to chime a lost tracker with the ring mode (it is louder than an AirTag, at least to my ears), and can also be shared with family or friends, if you need help in tracking. It is to be expected that the Noise Tag 1 would have a year's worth of battery life, similar to my experience over the years with an Apple AirTag — both use the same CR2032 type 3V lithium coin cell battery, easily replaceable too. The IPX4 splash resistance should help too, just in case your luggage finds itself immersed in the contents of a leaked bottle of water. The price of the Noise Tag 1 certainly adds value to this proposition, as does the compatibility with Android phones. There are choices aplenty for luggage and item trackers, but most don't do the task as consistently as the Noise Tag 1, or simply don't work with Android as well as an iPhone. For once, no limitations to work around. Ahead of WWDC, Speechify has won the 2025 Apple Design Award for Inclusivity. The developers say this is the most popular app in the world to have anything read out loud to you, with hundreds of voices and more than 50 languages available. The proposition is simple — turn any written text into audio, be it from a document, a scan, a PDF file or a web page. 'The app offers an approachable UI with a variety of accessibility features - Dynamic Type and VoiceOver among them - that make it an instantly helpful tool for everyone: students, professionals, and leisure readers, as well as auditory learners and people with low vision. The design team clearly worked to reduce cognitive load all throughout the app too,' Speechify's Founder & CEO, Cliff Weitzman, tells us. You'll see them on the WWDC main stage. OpenAI has shared details on the next phase of its AI for Impact Accelerator in India. The key statistics include expanded funding and technical support to 11 nonprofits that use AI across multiple domains including across healthcare, education and agriculture, and that brings the total value of technical grants to $150,000. The new solution developers include Educate Girls, Rocket Learning, Noora Health and Digital Green. 'These organisations are solving some of the country's most complex challenges with ingenuity and empathy. The AI for Impact Accelerator - now part of OpenAI Academy - is our way of learning from them, while ensuring frontier technology is being shaped by and in service of real communities,' Pragya Misra, Policy & Partnerships Lead for OpenAI India, tells us. Rocket Learning, for instance, is using WhatsApp and generative AI to deliver personalised early learning experiences for parents and daycare workers, in the hope of improving school readiness across underserved communities. They claim to have reached 4 million children across 11 states. Digital Green is an attempt at scaling peer-to-peer agricultural learning, with curated insights and crop recommendations, to help boost agriculture. Educate Girls claims to have re-enrolled over 2 million girls, and improved learning processes for as many as 2.4 million children across 30,000 villages, while using AI to identify out-of-school girls and help with faster re-enrolment.
