By Jeffrey Dustin
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Alphabet, the parent of Google that pioneered self-driving cars and quantum computing, is making its biggest bet closer to home: online search.
Applying artificial intelligence to the search business that has made Google a household name remains a major gambit for the company, Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s president and chief investment officer, said at the Reuters NEXT conference in New York on Tuesday.
“We are meeting people where they want to go,” said Porat, in an interview with Reuters Editor-in-Chief Alessandra Galloni.
Alphabet, which makes most of its more than $300 billion in annual revenue from advertising-related advertising, has put AI-generated surveys to questions that don’t have obvious answers, in another example of its efforts.
This move followed a competition from ChatGPT-developer OpenAI and required Google to move into the hallucinatory area, where AI sometimes creates information in so-called “hallucinations.”
(Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler and Rosalba O’Brien)