This Week in AI: Google AI Mode is Coming
When Google started testing its AI mode a couple months ago, it seemed like an acknowledgement of a shift. The way we were using technology was changing so much, and so rapidly, that the world's most popular website was willing to radically change to keep up.
Well, now that shift is coming a bit closer as Google prepares to upend how we search across the web. The company has shifted from its initial plans to offer AI mode as a test for opt-in users to rolling it out broadly, The Verge reported, making the technology available outside its "labs" setting to a "small percentage" of users.
AI Mode will sit to the left of the "All," tab in search results, giving it a prominent place in the world's most popular website. Not only will it allow people to interact with Google's AI, likely goosing its current 350 million user count, it will also radically change the way the internet works and behaves.
For the past two decades, online companies have relied on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to ensure rankings within the wall of blue links that made Google a household name. Now, AI mode means they'll have to learn how to teach an AI to pick their website as a reference link over others, which may require wildly different writing and coding skills to master.
The Verge also noted that AI mode has been updated with new features as well, including a past-searches panel on the left side of the screen, effectively allowing you to pick up where you left off.
While Google is muscling in on OpenAI's ChatGPT and SearchGPT...
OpenAI is taking on shopping
For years, companies have said chatbots were going to revolutionize shopping. Now, OpenAI is the latest to try and make that happen. The startup added shopping features to its wildly popular ChatGPT, including product recommendations, pictures, reviews and purchase links.
OpenAI said its search feature, which is a roundabout competitor to Google's AI Mode, has already handled over 1 billion searches over the past week alone, according to a statement from the company. The feature is being made available for all its more than 400 million users worldwide, whether or not they pay for a subscription.
While you're using AI for your shopping...
Visa prepping for AI too
You had to know it was coming: After you figure out what to buy, of course you have to pay for it. And Visa said that its tokenization technology, which helps power digital shopping on other devices like our phones and watches, will be coming to AI as well. The company is even creating an AI shopping technology that will "let AI agents make transactions with clear guidelines set by the user."
"These agents will need to be trusted with payments, not only by users, but by banks and sellers as well," said Visa product and strategy chief Jack Forestell, according to ZDNet.
Visa said it is collaborating with AI industry leaders, including OpenAI, Anthropic, IBM, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Samsung and more.
Microsoft still seeing lots of profits from AI
The AI boom continues to be good for Microsoft, with the tech giant announcing profits of nearly $26 billion off sales of more than $70 billion for the three months ended March 31, driven -- of course -- by AI. Microsoft said sales for its Azure cloud division rose by a third, exceeding estimates. Microsoft said AI contributed to about half of that growth.
Microsoft's successes come as it continues to invest in AI technologies, including through relationships with companies like OpenAI and Meta, which owns Facebook and the competing Llama AI.
Speaking of Llama...
Meta releases its own AI app
First it was ChatGPT, then Google's Gemini. Now Meta has released its own AI app, appropriately named Meta AI. The new app, which was announced just weeks after the company's launch of Llama 4, is the social network's latest effort to take on OpenAI and Google.
Meta said its app will include a "discover" feature, to help people explore what AI can do. And it'll be the companion app for the company's Meta Ray Ban glasses and website, meaning users can pick up and continue previous conversations from one device to the next.
"We’re using our decades of work personalizing people’s experiences on our platforms to make Meta AI more personal," Meta said in a statement. "You can tell Meta AI to remember certain things about you (like that you love to travel and learn new languages), and it can also pick up important details based on context."Read more: AI Tools and Tips
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Ian Sherr is a widely published journalist who's covered nearly every major tech company from Apple to Netflix, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and more for CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and CNET. Aside from writing, he tinkers with tech at home, is a longtime fencer -- the kind with swords -- and began woodworking during the pandemic.
