Yesterday, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, demoed a host of new AI programs for Gemini and Google. Since OpenAI’s viral launch of ChatGPT in December 2022, Google has been in a race to compete in AI.
Perhaps the most important new program announced yesterday is “AI Mode” for Google Search. Instead of a traditional search for a term, users can ask Google questions (something that had started with “AI Overviews”).
This announcement comes at a critical time for Google. Its crown jewel, its search engine, faces pressure from AI chatbots. Eddy Cue, an Apple exec, testified at the antitrust against Google that Google searches in Safari dropped below 90 percent of searches for the first time since 2015.
Below are excerpts from Google’s announcement explaining the new AI Mode:
AI Mode in Search, for cutting-edge AI capabilities
As we’ve rolled out AI Overviews, we’ve heard from power users who want an end-to-end AI Search experience. So earlier this year we began testing AI Mode in Search in Labs, and starting today we’re rolling out AI Mode in the U.S. — no Labs sign-up required. AI Mode is our most powerful AI search, with more advanced reasoning and multimodality, and the ability to go deeper through follow-up questions and helpful links to the web. Over the coming weeks, you’ll see a new tab for AI Mode appear in Search and in the search bar in the Google app.
Results for illustrative purposes and may vary.
Under the hood, AI Mode uses our query fan-out technique, breaking down your question into subtopics and issuing a multitude of queries simultaneously on your behalf. This enables Search to dive deeper into the web than a traditional search on Google, helping you discover even more of what the web has to offer and find incredible, hyper-relevant content that matches your question.
AI Mode is where we’ll first bring Gemini’s frontier capabilities, and it’s also a glimpse of what’s to come. As we get feedback, we’ll graduate many features and capabilities from AI Mode right into the core Search experience. Starting this week, we’re bringing a custom version of Gemini 2.5, our most intelligent model, into Search for both AI Mode and AI Overviews in the U.S.
We also showed new advanced capabilities coming to AI Mode, which will be launching first in Labs in the coming months, to get feedback and input from power users. Read on for more.
Deep Search in AI Mode, to help you research
For questions where you want an even more thorough response, we’re bringing deep research capabilities into AI Mode with Deep Search. Deep Search uses the same query fan-out technique but taken to the next level. It can issue hundreds of searches, reason across disparate pieces of information, and create an expert-level fully-cited report in just minutes, saving you hours of research.
Results are for illustrative purposes and may vary. Product in development, final details may differ.
but will ai mode invite more copyright lawsuits against google?
Short answer: very likely yes.
Copyright lawsuits have already been filed against Microsoft, Perplexity, and other companies that rely on chatbots to provide search answers using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).
The U.S. Copyright took a dim view of RAG in its highly controversial pre-publication report on AI training issued a day before President Trump fired the Register of Copyrights Perlmutter:
“The use of copyrighted works by RAG265 requires separate consideration. Unlike pretraining where a large, diverse dataset is used to train a model for a wide variety of tasks, RAG
retrieves individual works because they are relevant to a user’s prompt, for the purpose of
enhancing the response. The use of RAG is less likely to be transformative where the purpose is to generate outputs that summarize or provide abridged versions of retrieved copyrighted
works, such as news articles, as opposed to hyperlinks.” p. 47
“Uses involving the retrieval of copyrighted works by RAG can also result in market
substitution. As described above, RAG augments AI model responses by retrieving relevant
content during the generation process, resulting in outputs that may be more likely to contain
protectable expression, including derivative summaries and abridgments. A user for whom the augmented response ‘satisf[ies] the . . . need’ for the original work will not pay to obtain
it in the marketplace.” pp. 63-64
“We note that RAG is an important feature of many AI products, and that RAG-related uses are of particular concern for news media stakeholders.” p. 31
RAG has received so little media attention in the copyright lawsuits. But it could be the most important aspect of all the lawsuits against AI.
And it’s no surprise Google feels compelled to shift to the AI-based question-and-answer approach. The days of traditional search engines are done.
Google and apple face analogous problems from ai
The Big Tech behemoths, Google and Apple, face different but analogous problems from AI. Google is probably far ahead of Apple in terms of developing its own AI model (Gemini), but the problem Google faces is similar to Apple’s: the existing revenue-generating business model–heavily dependent on Google search ads and iPhone sales, respectively–has been disrupted by AI. Traditional search engines appear to be on their way out. Traditional smartphones (lacking AI) may be, too. The only question right now is how big a threat AI poses to Google and Apple–and is it existential?
Against this backdrop of AI disruption, the prospect of facing a copyright lawsuit for AI training using copyrighted works seems almost trivial.