After months of speculation about its search ambitions, OpenAI has revealed SearchGPT, a “prototype” search engine that could eventually help the company tear off a slice of Google's lucrative business. OpenAI said that the new tool would help users find what they are looking for more quickly and easily by …
Read More »Amazon Is Investigating Perplexity Over Claims of Scraping Abuse
Amazon’s cloud division has launched an investigation into Perplexity AI. At issue is whether the AI search startup is violating Amazon Web Services rules by scraping websites that attempted to prevent it from doing so, WIRED has learned. AWS spokesperson Patrick Neighorn confirmed the company's investigation of Perplexity following a …
Read More »Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine
Considering Perplexity’s bold ambition and the investment it’s taken from Jeff Bezos’ family fund, Nvidia, and famed investor Balaji Srinivasan, among others, it’s surprisingly unclear what the AI search startup actually is. Earlier this year, speaking to WIRED, Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s CEO, described his product—a chatbot that gives natural-language answers …
Read More »Google Cut Back AI Overviews in Search Even Before Its ‘Pizza Glue’ Fiasco
As anyone who so much as glanced at the internet in the past few weeks probably noticed, Google’s sweeping AI upgrade to its search engine had a rocky start. Within days of the company launching AI-generated answers to search queries called AI Overviews, the feature was widely mocked for producing …
Read More »Google's AI Overviews Will Always Be Broken. That's How AI Works
A week after its algorithms advised people to eat rocks and put glue on pizza, Google admitted Thursday that it needed to make adjustments to its bold new generative AI search feature. The episode highlights the risks of Google’s aggressive drive to commercialize generative AI—and also the treacherous and fundamental …
Read More »Google Admits Its AI Overviews Search Feature Screwed Up
When bizarre and misleading answers to search queries generated by Google’s new AI Overview feature went viral on social media last week, the company issued statements that generally downplayed the notion the technology had problems. Late Thursday, the company’s head of search, Liz Reid, admitted that the flubs had highlighted …
Read More »Google Search’s New AI Overviews Will Soon Have Ads
Last week Google introduced a radical shake-up of search that presents users with AI-generated answers to their queries. Now the company says it will soon start including ads inside those AI Overviews, as the automatic answers are called. Google on Tuesday announced plans to test search and shopping ads in …
Read More »It’s the End of Google Search As We Know It
Google Search is about to fundamentally change—for better or worse. To align with Alphabet-owned Google’s grand vision of artificial intelligence, and prompted by competition from AI upstarts like ChatGPT, the company’s core product is getting reorganized, more personalized, and much more summarized by AI. At Google’s annual I/O developer conference …
Read More »Would You Still Use Google if It Didn't Pay Apple $20 Billion to Get on Your iPhone?
Microsoft has poured over $100 billion into developing its Bing search engine over the past two decades but has little market share to show for it. About nine out of every 10 web searches in the US are made through Google, with Bing splitting the remaining queries with a long …
Read More »Kids’ Cartoons Get a Free Pass From YouTube’s Deepfake Disclosure Rules
YouTube has updated its rulebook for the era of deepfakes. Starting today, anyone uploading video to the platform must disclose certain uses of synthetic media, including generative AI, so viewers know what they’re seeing isn’t real. YouTube says it applies to “realistic” altered media such as “making it appear as …
Read More »