Technology

As Microsoft takes the lead with AI-powered Bing Search and ChatGPT, Google is set to release new AI-powered Search next month, with more features coming this fall.

The new features will be available exclusively in the US, and will be released initially to a maximum of one million users, according to The New York Times.

The company plans are part of efforts to meet the threat posed by Microsoft's Bing chatbot and OpenAI's ChatGPT. "AI competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google's search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology," according to the report.

It is also upgrading the existing Search engine with AI features, said the report, citing internal documents.

The new features, under the project name "Magi", are being created by designers, engineers, and executives at the company.

A Google spokeswoman said in a statement that "not every brainstorm deck or product idea leads to a launch, but as we've said before, we're excited about bringing new AI-powered features to search, and will share more details soon".

Google's chatbot called Bard was released in March to a limited number of users in the US and the UK.

Bard, like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing chatbot, is based on a large language model (LLM), specifically a lightweight and optimised version of LaMDA, which the tech giant said will be updated with newer, more capable models in the future.

Users can interact with Bard by asking questions and refining their responses with follow-up questions.

However, Bard has a long way to go to catch up with ChatGPT and GPT-4.