Why Google’s AI Weakness Turned Out to Be a Strength

Sometimes people’s greatest weakness can be their biggest strength. And in AI, it is turning out that what we thought was a weakness for Google—the fact that it had both a search portal and an AI chatbot—is actually an advantage. People use search and AI chatbots interchangeably, to be sure, but it’s become clear through the course of this year that an AI chatbot is not a replacement for a search engine. Sometimes people want a very quick, simple answer that is best coming from a search engine, not a chatbot.

This issue is a particular problem for OpenAI, as we detailed in this story today. The AI leader has poured research into developing reasoning models that are good at complicated tasks, our story explained, but aren’t suited for queries calling for a quick, simple answer. OpenAI staffers realized they had a problem when they noticed that improvements to the underlying AI model didn’t matter much to users, many of whom used ChatGPT to ask basic things rather than the complicated math and science questions the model was suited for.