Investment chief says Google’s biggest bet is artificial intelligence search

Jeffrey Dustin

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Google parent Alphabet, a pioneer in self-driving cars and quantum computing, is placing its biggest bet closer to home: online search.

Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s president and chief investment officer, told the Reuters NEXT conference in New York on Tuesday that applying artificial intelligence to the search business that made Google a household name remains the company’s biggest strategy.

“We’re meeting people where they want to go next,” Porat told Reuters editor-in-chief Alessandra Galloni in an interview.

Alphabet, which has more than $300 billion in annual revenue, much of it from search-related advertising, is one example of its efforts to inject artificial intelligence-generated summaries into queries that have no obvious answers.

The move follows competition from ChatGPT maker OpenAI and requires Google to grapple with tricky terrain in which artificial intelligence sometimes fabricates information in so-called “hallucinations.”

(Reporting by Jeffrey Dustin in New York; Editing by Leslie Adler and Rosalba O’Brien)