Is big tech's A.I. game coming into focus?

One app to rule them all

Excerpt:" 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.

Seemingly every major tech company is after the same goal. OpenAI markets ChatGPT, for instance, as able to write code and summarize documents, help shop, produce graphics, and naturally, search the web. Elon Musk is notoriously obsessed with the idea of turning X into an everything app.

Meta says you can use its AI “for everything you need”; Amazon calls its new, generative AI–powered Alexa+ “an assistant available to help any time you want”; Microsoft bills its AI Copilot as a companion “for all you do”; and Apple has marketed Apple Intelligence and a revamped Siri as tools that will revolutionize how people use their iPhones (which encompass, for many users, everything). Even Airbnb, once focused simply on vacation rentals, is redesigning itself as a place where “you can sell and do almost anything,” as its CEO, Brian Chesky, recently said.

In a sense, everything apps are the logical conclusion of Silicon Valley’s race to build artificial “general” intelligence, or AGI. A bot smart enough to do anything obviously would be used to power a product that can, in effect, do anything. But such apps would also represent the culmination of the tech industry’s aim to entrench its products in people’s daily lives.

Already, Google has features for shopping, navigation, data storage, work software, payment, travel—plus an array of smartphones, tablets, smart-home gadgets, and more. Apple has a similarly all-encompassing suite of offerings, and Meta’s three major apps (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) each have billions of users. Perhaps the only thing more powerful than these sprawling tech ecosystems is boiling them all down to a single product."