Google’s chief executive officer (CEO) Sundar Pichai told The Wall Street Journal in an interview that conversational AI would become an integral part of the world’s largest search engine. “The opportunity space, if anything, is bigger than before. Will people be able to ask questions to Google and engage with LLMs in the context of search? Absolutely,” he said

A large language model (LLM) is a machine learning model that performs a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including generating and classifying text, answering questions in a conversational manner, and translating text from one language to another.

Google has been using LLMs and AI systems internally for a long time to better comprehend complex queries. However, the launch of ChatGPT by Microsoft-backed OpenAI last year has kickstarted a race to integrate such systems in consumer-facing products with internet search being the biggest beneficiary.

The Big Tech giant launched Bard — a competitor to the likes of ChatGPT or Baidu’s Ernie — earlier this year. However, the initial response was marred by a factual mistake committed by the chat AI platform.

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The company posted a GIF of its new AI Bard in action, showing the chatbot giving a factually inaccurate response to a prompt. In the GIF, the chatbot is prompted, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year-old about?”

Bard responded with several answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system or exoplanets.This is where it went wrong as the first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA. This led to a massive rout in the share prices of its parent Alphabet, which lost $100 billion in market cap.

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Further, Pichai’s comments indicate that Google plans to allow users to interact directly with the company’s LLMs via its search engine — a move that would upend the traditional link-based experience.

In the interview, Pichai said Google is testing several new search products, such as versions that allow users to ask follow-up questions to their original queries. Last month, Google said it would begin “thoughtfully integrating LLMs into search in a deeper way”.

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