Google asks Larry Page and Sergey Brin for help with ChatGPT competitor

Google enlisted the help of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to discuss the company’s AI strategy. Managers would feel the pressure to respond to ChatGPT. Later this year, Google would release its own chatbot search engine, writes The New York Times.

Current Google CEO Sundar Pichai would have asked Page and Brin to think about the company’s strategy, writes The New York Times based on sources associated with those conversations. Page and Brin are still involved with Google, but have not been in charge for some time. Page and Brin would have looked at the product strategy around artificial intelligence and given their advice about it. According to those involved, managers within the company would feel the competitive pressure to set up their own chatbot that competes with ChatGPT.

ChatGPT came out in beta at the end of November. Google is also working on artificial intelligence and is developing its own chatbot called LaMDA, but it is not publicly available. So far, the company hasn’t revealed much about the project or when it will be released for general use. According to The New York Times, the company wants to release its own version of its search engine including chatbot “later this year”. It is not known when that will happen, but it may be revealed during developer conference I/O, which takes place in May.

In addition, Google would release at least twenty other artificial intelligence tools. For example, it would include a tool called Colab, which developers can use to automatically develop Android apps. Google also wants to release a programming tool called PaLM-Coder 2.

CEO Pichai has meanwhile given ‘code red’ within the company. That would mean that some products would have to be tested, approved and made ready for release more quickly.