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.”
Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.
Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images
Artificial intelligence is projected to reach $4.8 trillion in market value by 2033, but the technology’s benefits remain highly concentrated, according to the U.N. Trade and Development agency.
In a report released on Thursday, UNCTAD said the AI market cap would roughly equate to the size of Germany’s economy, with the technology offering productivity gains and driving digital transformation.
However, the agency also raised concerns about automation and job displacement, warning that AI could affect 40% of jobs worldwide. On top of that, AI is not inherently inclusive, meaning the economic gains from the tech remain “highly concentrated,” the report added.
“The benefits of AI-driven automation often favour capital over labour, which could widen inequality and reduce the competitive advantage of low-cost labour in developing economies,” it said.
The potential for AI to cause unemployment and inequality is a long-standing concern, with the IMF making similar warnings over a year ago. In January, The World Economic Forum released findings that as many as 41% of employers were planning on downsizing their staff in areas where AI could replicate them.
However, the UNCTAD report also highlights inequalities between nations, with U.N. data showing that 40% of global corporate research and development spending in AI is concentrated among just 100 firms, mainly those in the U.S. and China.
Furthermore, it notes that leading tech giants, such as Apple, Nvidia and Microsoft — companies that stand to benefit from the AI boom — have a market value that rivals the gross domestic product of the entire African continent.
This AI dominance at national and corporate levels threatens to widen those technological divides, leaving many nations at risk of lagging behind, UNCTAD said. It noted that 118 countries — mostly in the Global South — are absent from major AI governance discussions.
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But AI is not just about job replacement, the report said, noting that it can also “create new industries and and empower workers” — provided there is adequate investment in reskilling and upskilling.
But in order for developing nations not to fall behind, they must “have a seat at the table” when it comes to AI regulation and ethical frameworks, it said.
In its report, UNCTAD makes a number of recommendations to the international community for driving inclusive growth. They include an AI public disclosure mechanism, shared AI infrastructure, the use of open-source AI models and initiatives to share AI knowledge and resources.
Open-source generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available on the web for possible modification and redistribution.
“AI can be a catalyst for progress, innovation, and shared prosperity – but only if countries actively shape its trajectory,” the report concludes.
“Strategic investments, inclusive governance, and international cooperation are key to ensuring that AI benefits all, rather than reinforcing existing divides.”
Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner said Thursday that he’s moving out of the “bomb shelter” with Nvidia and into a position of safety, expecting that the chipmaker is positioned to withstand President Donald Trump’s widespread tariffs.
“The growth and the demand for GPUs is off the charts,” he told CNBC’s “Fast Money Halftime Report,” referring to Nvidia’s graphics processing units that are powering the artificial intelligence boom. He said investors just need to listen to commentary from OpenAI, Google and Elon Musk.
President Trump announced an expansive and aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy in a ceremony at the White House on Wednesday. The plan established a 10% baseline tariff, though many countries like China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to steeper rates. The announcement sent stocks tumbling on Thursday, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq down more than 5%, headed for its worst day since 2022.
The big reason Nvidia may be better positioned to withstand Trump’s tariff hikes is because semiconductors are on the list of exceptions, which Gerstner called a “wise exception” due to the importance of AI.
Nvidia’s business has exploded since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, and annual revenue has more than doubled in each of the past two fiscal years. After a massive rally, Nvidia’s stock price has dropped by more than 20% this year and was down almost 7% on Thursday.
Gerstner is concerned about the potential of a recession due to the tariffs, but is relatively bullish on Nvidia, and said the “negative impact from tariffs will be much less than in other areas.”
He said it’s key for the U.S. to stay competitive in AI. And while the company’s chips are designed domestically, they’re manufactured in Taiwan “because they can’t be fabricated in the U.S.” Higher tariffs would punish companies like Meta and Microsoft, he said.
“We’re in a global race in AI,” Gerstner said. “We can’t hamper our ability to win that race.”
YouTube on Thursday announced new video creation tools for Shorts, its short-form video feed that competes against TikTok.
The features come at a time when TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is at risk of an effective ban in the U.S. if it’s not sold to an American owner by April 5.
Among the new tools is an updated video editor that allows creators to make precise adjustments and edits, a feature that automatically syncs video cuts to the beat of a song and AI stickers.
The creator tools will become available later this spring, said YouTube, which is owned by Google.
Along with the new features, YouTube last week said it was changing the way view counts are tabulated on Shorts. Under the new guidelines, Shorts views will count the number of times the video is played or replayed with no minimum watch time requirement.
Previously, views were only counted if a video was played for a certain number of seconds. This new tabulation method is similar to how views are counted on TikTok and Meta’s Reels, and will likely inflate view counts.
“We got this feedback from creators that this is what they wanted. It’s a way for them to better understand when their Shorts have been seen,” YouTube Chief Product Officer Johanna Voolich said in a YouTube video. “It’s useful for creators who post across multiple platforms.”