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Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, and in turn their flagship products, are beginning to look and feel the same. Meta is revamping Facebook and Instagram with a chatbot. Google recently debuted a new feature in its search engine—“AI Mode”—that functionally turns Google Search into something akin to ChatGPT. At the same time, OpenAI has added search features to ChatGPT that make it more like Google Search. These tech giants aren’t using AI simply to build chatbots, but to create everything apps: one place where users can work, learn, manage their finances, talk to friends, plan outings, and do just about anything else. As I wrote this week, Google, Meta, and the like can realistically have such lofty ambitions because they have spent more than a decade gathering enormous amounts of information on billions of people through their sprawling product ecosystems—a trove of personal data that generative AI is uniquely able to synthesize. “The promised convenience of everything apps is, after all, alluring,” I wrote. “The more products of any one company you use, and the better integrated those products are, the more personalized and universal its everything app can be.” Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and even Airbnb are after this same thing, too. In other words, everyone wants to build an everything app. Such all-consuming tools, I wrote, “represent the culmination of the tech industry’s aim to entrench its products in people’s daily lives.” |
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| | (Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: NonVFXStudio / Getty; Marina Demeshko / Getty.) | | | |
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| If Google has its way, there will be no search bars, no search terms, no searching (at least not by humans). The very tool that has defined the company—and perhaps the entire internet—for nearly three decades could soon be overtaken by a chatbot. Last month, at its annual software conference, Google launched “AI Mode,” the most drastic overhaul to its search engine in the company’s history. The feature is different from the AI summaries that already show up in Google’s search results, which appear above the usual list of links to outside websites. Instead, AI Mode functionally replaces Google Search with something akin to ChatGPT. You ask a question and the AI spits out an answer. Instead of sifting through a list of blue links, you can just ask a follow-up. Google has begun rolling out AI Mode to users in the United States as a tab below the search bar (before “Images,” “Shopping,” and the like). The company said it will soon introduce a number of more advanced, experimental capabilities to AI Mode, at which point the feature could be able to write a research report in minutes, “see” through your smartphone’s camera to assist with physical tasks such as a DIY crafts project, help book restaurant reservations, make payments. Whether AI Mode can become as advanced and as seamless as Google promises remains far from certain, but the firm appears to be aiming for something like an everything app: a single tool that will be able to do just about everything a person could possibly want to do online. | |
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- The Gen Z lifestyle subsidy: “Instead of cheap Ubers and subsidized pizza delivery, today’s college students get free SuperGrok,” writes Lila Shroff.
- The great AI lock-in has begun: “Generative AI appears less revolutionary and more like all the previous websites, platforms, and gadgets fighting to grab your attention and never let it go,” I wrote earlier this year.
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Since the rapid proliferation of sports betting that began in 2018, all signs have pointed to a spike in gambling addiction. But America is not equipped with the funding, expertise, and institutions necessary to handle such a crisis, my colleague Hana Kiros reports. —Matteo Sign up for Work in Progress, a newsletter in which Derek Thompson, Rogé Karma, Annie Lowrey, and others explain today’s news and tomorrow’s trends in work, technology, and culture. For full access to our journalism, subscribe to The Atlantic. |
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