After threat from Samsung, Google scrambles for new AI-powered search engine: report

While Google has dominated the search market for years, Microsoft is all set to take on the tech giant with its AI-powered Bing search engine. According to a report in the New York Times (NYT), South Korean phone-maker Samsung is reportedly looking to replace Google with Bing as the default search engine on its devices.

This comes as a big setback for Google since Samsung is the second-largest smartphone manufacturer globally and uses Android operating system in its devices.

According to the NYT report, an estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.

As of January 2023, online search engine Bing accounted for 8.85% of the global search market, while Google had a share of around 84.69%, according to Statista.

Meanwhile, Google is also looking to revamp its search products, including creating an entirely new AI-powered search engine, the report said.

The tech major is developing an entirely new AI search engine, named “Magi,” that would offer a more tailored experience to users. It is also planning to add AI services to its existing search engine, and reportedly expects to release these tools for public use next month.

This comes after Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai repeatedly said that the company doesn’t want to rush into releasing AI products. Pichai also said that Google was being cautious about rolling out more advanced AI to ensure that society could adapt to the new technology.

In a recent interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes, Pichai called artificial intelligence “the most profound technology humanity is working on.”

In the same interview, Pichai said that the push to adopt artificial intelligence technology must be well regulated to avoid potential harmful effects.

“We don’t have all the answers there yet, and the technology is moving fast,” Pichai said. “So does that keep me up at night? Absolutely.” The NYT report quoted him as saying.

Among the risks of generative AI that Pichai highlighted are deepfake videos.

“Anybody who has worked with AI for a while, you know, you realise this is something so different and so deep that we would need societal regulations to think about how to adapt,” he said.

Recently, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company is not training GPT-5, the successor to its GPT-4 language model.

This comes after Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak among others have called for a pause on training AI models more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4.

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