It looks like Google will reveal how it plans to take on the highly successful ChatGPT AI, possibly within days.
The tech giant has scheduled a 40-minute event for Wednesday February 8, when it will reveal how it is “reimagining how people search, explore and interact with information”.
“Join us to learn how we’re opening up better access to information for people everywhere, through Search, Maps and beyond,” the company says.
It is not clear if the event will be focused on AI, but it comes days later GoogleChief executive Sundar Pichai announced that the company will make its chatbot technology publicly available in the coming weeks.
Speaking on a call with investors in Alphabet’s parent company on Thursday, Mr Pichai said people will be able to “engage directly” with Google’s conversational AI – starting with one called LaMDA, which has been in testing.
Mr. Pichai said: “Our long-term investments in deep computer science position us very well as AI reaches an inflection point, and I’m excited about the AI-driven leaps we’re about to unveil in search and more beyond.”
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Google has reportedly been rapidly expanding its plans for so-called large language models since then GPT Chataddress.
ChatGPT itself is one such model – an AI chatbot trained on massive amounts of text data, which it leverages to help generate responses and conduct realistic conversations.
Released by research firm OpenAI late last year, it threatened to treat how people prepare for job interviews, journalists write storiesand children do homework.
The New York Times reports that Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin have been brought back to help add features like ChatGPT to the search engine they launched more than 25 years ago.
Google has been cautious about chatbots so far, and LaMDA has had limited testing. Last summer, the company fired a senior engineer after claiming he was sentient.
Rival Microsoft It also plans to infuse its own products with AI, including the Bing search engine, after investing a billion dollars in OpenAI.
Microsoft has since announced plans to implement ChatGPT into its Teams software, where it will do things like summary meetings, but the features will be limited to a premium pricing plan.
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Some internet startups are already bringing chatbots into search, but on a much smaller scale than the likes of Google and Microsoft might.
Sites like Neeva and You.com use their AI to offer summarized answers to search queries, with citations showing where the information came from.
One of the main criticisms of ChatGPT is the lack of such transparency, and the responses generated often show that they fully trust what he is saying even when it is wrong or misleading.
The upcoming Google event will be broadcast live from Paris on YouTube from 1.30pm UK time.
It comes just weeks after its parent company 12,000 job cuts announced.