On Wednesday, Googlepreviewed what could be one of the largest changes to the search engine in its history.
Google will use AI models to combine and summarize information from around the web in response to search queries, a product it calls Search Generative Experience.
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Instead of “ten blue links,” the phrase that describes Google’s usual search results, Google will show some users paragraphs of AI-generated text and a handful of links at the top of the results page.
The new AI-based search is being tested now for a select group of users and isn’t widely available yet. But website publishers are already worried that if it becomes Google’s default way of presenting search results, it could hurt them by sending fewer visitors to their sites and keeping them on Google.com.
The controversy highlights a long-running tension between Google and the websites it indexes, with a new artificial intelligence twist. Publishers have long worried that Google repurposes their verbatim content in snippets on its own website, but now Google is using advanced machine learning models that scrape large parts of the web to “train” the software to spit out human-like text and responses.
Rutledge Daugette, CEO of TechRaptor, a site focusing on gaming news and reviews, said that Google’s move was made without considering the interests of publishers and Google’s AI amounts to lifting content.
“Their focus is on zero-click searches that use information from publishers and writers who spend time and effort creating quality content, without offering any benefit other than the potential of a click,” Rutledge told CNBC. “Thus far, AI has been quick to reuse others’ information with zero benefit to them, and in cases like Google Bard doesn’t even offer attribution as to where the information it’s using came from.”
Luther Lowe, a longtime Google critic and chief of public policy at Yelp, said that Google’s update is part of a decades-long strategy to keep users on the site for longer, instead of sending them to the sites that originally hosted the information.
“The exclusionary self-preferencing of Google’s ChatGPT clone into search is the final chapter of bloodletting the web,” Lowe told CNBC.
According to SearchEngineLand, a news website that closely tracks changes to Google’s search engine, the AI-generated results are displayed above the organic search results in testing so far.
SGE comes in a differently colored box — green in the example — and includes boxed links to three websites on the right side. In Google’s primary example, all three of the website headlines were cut off.
Google says that the information isn’t taken from the websites, but is instead corroborated by the links. SearchEngineLand said the SGE approach was an improvement and a “healthier” way to link than Google’s Bard chatbot, which rarely linked to publisher websites.
Some publishers are wondering if they can prevent AI firms such as Google from scraping their content to train their models. Companies such as the firm behind Stable Diffusion are already facing lawsuits from data owners, but the right to scrape web data for AI remains an undecided frontier. Other companies, such as Reddit, have announced plans to charge for access to their data.
Leading the charge in the publishing world is Barry Diller, Chairman of IAC, which owns websites including All Recipes, People Magazine and The Daily Beast.
“If all the world’s information is able to be sucked up into this maw, and then essentially repackaged in declarative sentences, in what’s called chat, but it isn’t chat — as many grafs as you want, 25 on any subject — there will be no publishing, because it will be impossible,” Diller said last month at a conference.
“What you have to do is get the industry to say that you cannot scrape our content, until you work out systems where the publisher gets some avenue towards payment,” Diller continued, saying that Google will face this problem.
Diller says he believes publishers can sue AI firms under copyright law and that current “fair use” restrictions need to be redefined. The Financial Times reported on Wednesday that Diller is leading a group of publishers “that is going to say we are going to change copyright law if necessary.” An IAC spokesperson declined to make Diller available for an interview.
One challenge facing publishers is confirming that their content is being used by an AI. Google did not reveal training sources for its large language model that underpins SGE, PaLM 2, and Daugette says while he’s seen examples of quotes and review scores from competitors repurposed on Bard without attribution, it’s hard to tell when the information is from his site without directly linked sources.
Google didn’t respond to a request for comment. “PaLM 2 is trained on a wide range of openly available data on the internet and we obviously value the health of the web ecosystem. And that’s really part of the way we think about how we build our products, to ensure that we have a healthy ecosystem where creators are a part of that thriving ecosystem,” Google VP of Research Zoubin Ghahramani said in a media briefing earlier this week.
Daugette says that Google’s moves make being an independent publisher tough.
“I think it’s really frustrating for our industry to have to worry about our hard work being taken, when so many colleagues are being laid off,” Daugette said. “It’s just not okay.”
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Meta shares hit a record high on Monday, underscoring investor interest in the company’s new AI superintelligence group.
The company’s shares reached $747.90 during midday trading, topping Meta’s previous stock market record in February when it began laying off the 5% of its workforce that it deemed “low performers.”
Meta joins Microsoft and Nvidia among tech megacaps that have reached new highs of late, all closing at records Monday. Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Tesla remain below their all-time highs reached late last year or early this year.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on an AI hiring blitz amid fierce competition with rivals such as OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet. Earlier in June, Meta said it would hire Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang and some of his colleagues as part of a $14.3 billion investment into the executive’s data labeling and annotation startup.
The social media company also hired Nat Friedman and his business partner, Daniel Gross, the chief of Safe Superintelligence, an AI startup with a valuation of $32 billion, CNBC reported on June 19. Meta’s attempts to buy Safe Superintelligence were rebuffed by the startup’s founder and AI expert Ilya Sutskever, the report noted.
Wang and Friedman are the leaders of Meta’s new Superintelligence Labs, tasked with overseeing the company’s artificial intelligence foundation models, projects and research, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC. The term superintelligence refers to technology that exceeds human capability.
Bloomberg News first reported about the new superintelligence unit.
Meta has also snatched AI researchers from OpenAI. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said during a podcast that Meta was offering signing bonuses as high as $100 million.
Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s technology chief, spoke about the social media company’s AI hiring spree during a June 20 interview with CNBC’s “Closing Bell Overtime,” saying that the talent market is “really incredible and kind of unprecedented in my 20-year career as a technology executive.”
An electric air taxi by Joby Aviation flies near the Downtown Manhattan Heliport in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., November 12, 2023.
Roselle Chen | Reuters
Joby Aviation stock soared about 12% as the flying air taxi maker got closer to launching a service in the United Arab Emirates.
The electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, company said Monday that it delivered its first aircraft to the UAE and has completed piloted flight tests as it readies for a 2026 launch in the region.
“Our flights and operational footprint in Dubai are a monumental step toward weaving air taxi services into the fabric of daily life worldwide,” said founder and CEO JoeBen Bevirt in a release. He called the Middle East nation a “launchpad for a global revolution in how we move.”
Joby’s planned launch in the UAE was announced in February 2024 as part of an agreement with Dubai’s Road and Transport Authority. The deal included exclusive rights to conduct air taxi service in Dubai for six years.
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As part of the project, Joby said in November that it began building one vertiport at Dubai International Airport, with three additional locations slated for Palm Jumeirah and Dubai’s downtown and marina. Joby also announced an air taxi agreement with three Abu Dhabi government departments in 2024.
The California-based company has made other expansion moves in the Middle East. Shares jumped earlier this month after Saudi Arabian firm Abdul Latif Jameel announced a roughly $1 billion investment for up to 300 eVTOLs. The firm participated in Joby’s Series C funding round.
Joby shares have surged more than 32% this year, swelling its market capitalization to over $9 billion.
Demand for air taxis, which take off and land similar to helicopters, has gained momentum in recent years. The service faces regulatory and safety hurdles but has been lauded for its ability to cut traffic congestion and slash emissions.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that included a pilot program for testing electric air taxis.
Oracle CEO Safra Catz speaks at the FII PRIORITY Summit in Miami Beach, Florida, on Feb. 20, 2025.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images
Oracle shares jumped more than 5% after a recent filing showed a cloud deal that would add over $30 billion annually.
CEO Safra Catz is slated to share the deal news at a company meeting Monday, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The revenues are expected to start hitting in the 2028 fiscal year.
“Oracle is off to a strong start in FY26,” Catz is expected to say, according to the filing. “Our MultiCloud database revenue continues to grow at over 100%, and we signed multiple large cloud services agreements including one that is expected to contribute more than $30 billion in annual revenue starting in FY28.”
The deals revealed Monday by Catz will not affect the company’s 2026 guidance, according to the filing.