It's becoming more apparent with each story we come across that Big Tech's arms race in generative artificial intelligence has been brewing for even longer than we may have surmised. What we've seen so far with the circus around ChatGPT and its infusion into Microsoft Bing as well as Google's rush to get its Bard chatbot into the public eye seems to only scratch the surface of things. A comprehensive report from The New York Times is detailing the new AI-powered tricks we may see from Mountain View and the crucial reason developers are crunching.

The goodies

If you're looking for the new AI tools you might get to use coming out of all of this, here's what the Times has found out from documents circulating around Google as well as a couple of insiders:

• A flagship, fully-featured conversational chatbot for search that could include ad inserts between answers
• Searchalong, what sounds like a context-aware browsing assistant housed in a Chrome extension
• GIFI, an image generation engine based in Google Image search (chances are you may see it on Gboard, too), and;
• Tivoli Tutor, a conversation-driven language learning medium

These features (and perhaps others) make up a large project that's been dubbed Magi. We could see at least some of the features strictly tied to the search chatbot announced next month, likely at Google I/O starting May 10, and a slow rollout exclusive to the United States throughout the year — specifically, as many as one million users to start out and up to 30 million by 2024. Developers are set to receive access to Magi SDKs at the outset, but the company could have a second wave of announcements and tools ready for the fall season.

For Google's part, spokesperson Lara Levin said in a statement:

...not every brainstorm deck or product idea leads to a launch, but as we've said before, we're excited about bringing new A.I.-powered features to search, and will share more details soon.

The motivation

Google's search business, which was directly attributed to more than $145 billion in revenues last year, is on a precipice in 2023 as it navigates two major contract renewals for preferred search engine status on Samsung and Apple devices — crucially important since we're basically talking about the two largest mobile brands on the planet. It's been reported that Samsung indicated to Google last month that it was considering switching to Microsoft Bing. While the South Korean manufacturer didn't specify why, the digital ads giant took it as a sign that it needed to solidify its AI offerings. The Samsung contract, currently under negotiation, is estimated to generate $3 billion in search revenues a year. Apple's deal, which is about to come up for talks and was said to cost Google $9 billion in 2018, is said to drive $20 billion.

The Times summarizes Google's response to these stipulations by saying that it's constantly working on its search engine to retain existing users and partners and attract new ones. It also says that Android phone makers can exercise their option to contract with other service providers for the sake of their users. Samsung and Microsoft declined to comment on the story.

More about Magi

If you've ever interacted with a chatbot, you may be able to figure out the gist of how using the Magi search chatbot will go: users will enter queries, the chatbot will learn to anticipate what users want to look for as time goes along, and when dispensing results, it will offer buttons linking users to information resources, product purchase pages, and other endpoints. Product-related search results would still feature promoted items first.

The search chatbot component of Magi does not have a release schedule — and for good reason, as early-stage generative AI is still prone to influence by disinformation and misinformation — though Google had been looking for volunteers within the company to test out features last week. A source says about 160 employees are working full-time on Magi.