Google took its next leap in artificial intelligence Wednesday with the launch of project Gemini, an AI model trained to behave in human-like ways that’s likely to intensify the debate about the technology’s potential promise and perils.

The rollout will unfold in phases, with less sophisticated versions of Gemini called “Nano” and “Pro” being immediately incorporated into Google’s AI-powered chatbot Bard and its Pixel 8 Pro smartphone.

With Gemini providing a helping hand, Google promises Bard will become more intuitive and better at tasks that involve planning. On the Pixel 8 Pro, Gemini will be able to quickly summarize recordings made on the device and provide automatic replies on messaging services, starting with WhatsApp, according to Google.

Gemini’s biggest advances won’t come until early next year when its Ultra model will be used to launch “Bard Advanced,” a juiced-up version of the chatbot that initially will only be offered to a test audience.

The AI, at first, will only work in English throughout the world, although Google executives assured reporters during a briefing that the technology will have no problem eventually diversifying into other languages.

Based on a demonstration of Gemini for a group of reporters, Google’s “Bard Advanced” might be capable of unprecedented AI multitasking by simultaneously recognizing and understanding presentations involving text, photos and video.

Gemini will also eventually be infused into Google’s dominant search engine, although the timing of that transition hasn’t been spelled out yet.

“This is a significant milestone in the development of AI, and the start of a new era for us at Google,” declared Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, the AI division behind Gemini. Google prevailed over other bidders, including Facebook parent Meta, to acquire London-based DeepMind nearly a decade ago, and since melded it with its “Brain” division to focus on Gemini’s development.

The technology’s problem-solving skills are being touted by Google as being especially adept in math and physics, fueling hopes among AI optimists that it may lead to scientific breakthroughs that improve life for humans.

But an opposing side of the AI debate worries about the technology eventually eclipsing human intelligence, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs and perhaps even more destructive behavior, such as amplifying misinformation or triggering the deployment of nuclear weapons.

“We’re approaching this work boldly and responsibly,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post. “That means being ambitious in our research and pursuing the capabilities that will bring enormous benefits to people and society, while building in safeguards and working collaboratively with governments and experts to address risks as AI becomes more capable.”

Gemini’s arrival is likely to up the ante in an AI competition that has been escalating for the past year, with San Francisco startup OpenAI and long-time industry rival Microsoft.

Backed by Microsoft’s financial muscle and computing power, OpenAI was already deep into developing its most advanced AI model, GPT-4, when it released the free ChatGPT tool late last year. That AI-fueled chatbot rocketed to global fame, bringing buzz to the commercial promise of generative AI and pressuring Google to push out Bard in response.

Just as Bard was arriving on the scene, OpenAI released GPT-4 in March and has since been building in new capabilities aimed at consumers and business customers, including a feature unveiled in November that enables the chatbot to analyze images. It’s been competing for business against other rival AI startups such as Anthropic and even its partner, Microsoft, which has exclusive rights to OpenAI’s technology in exchange for the billions of dollars that it has poured into the startup.

The alliance so far has been a boon for Microsoft, which has seen its market value climb by more than 50% so far this year, primarily because of investors’ belief that AI will turn into a gold mine for the tech industry. Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet, also has been riding the same wave with its market value rising more than $500 billion, or about 45%, so far this year. Despite the anticipation surrounding Gemini in recent months, Alphabet’s stock edged down slightly in trading Wednesday.

Microsoft’s deepening involvement in OpenAI during the past year, coupled with OpenAI’s more aggressive attempts to commercialize its products, has raised concerns that the non-profit has strayed from its original mission to protect humanity as the technology progresses.

Those worries were magnified last month when OpenAI’s board abruptly fired CEO Sam Altman in a dispute revolving around undisclosed issues of trust. After backlash that threatened to destroy the company and result in a mass exodus of AI engineering talent to Microsoft, OpenAI brought Altman back as CEO and reshuffled its board.

With Gemini coming out, OpenAI may find itself trying to prove its technology remains smarter than Google’s.

“I am in awe of what it’s capable of,” Google DeepMind vice president of product Eli Collins said of Gemini.

In a virtual press conference, Google declined to share Gemini’s parameter count — one but not the only measure of a model’s complexity. A white paper released Wednesday outlined the most capable version of Gemini outperforming GPT-4 on multiple-choice exams, grade-school math and other benchmarks, but acknowledged ongoing struggles in getting AI models to achieve higher-level reasoning skills.

Some computer scientists see limits in how much can be done with large language models, which work by repeatedly predicting the next word in a sentence and are prone to making up errors known as hallucinations.

“We made a ton of progress in what’s called factuality with Gemini. So Gemini is our best model in that regard. But it’s still, I would say, an unsolved research problem,” Collins said.

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An advanced geothermal project has begun pumping carbon-free electricity onto the Nevada grid to power Google data centers there, Google announced Tuesday.

Getting electrons onto the grid for the first time is a milestone many new energy companies never reach, said Tim Latimer, CEO and co-founder of Google’s geothermal partner in the project, Houston-based Fervo Energy.

“I think it will be big and it will continue to vault geothermal into a lot more prominence than it has been,” Latimer said in an interview.

The International Energy Agency has long projected geothermal could be a serious solution to climate change. It said in a 2011 roadmap document that geothermal could reach some 3.5% of global electricity generation annually by 2050, avoiding almost 800 megatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year.

But that potential has been mostly unrealized up until now. Today’s announcement could mark a turning point.

Fervo is using this first pilot to launch other projects that will deliver far more carbon-free electricity to the grid. It’s currently completing initial drilling in southwest Utah for a 400-megawatt project.

Google and Fervo Energy started working together in 2021 to develop next-generation geothermal power. Now that the site near Winnemucca, Nevada is operating commercially, it’s sending about 3.5 megawatts to the grid. There are three wells there.

The data centers require more electricity than that, so Google signed other agreements for solar and storage too. It has two sites in Nevada, one near Las Vegas and the other near Reno. Michael Terrell, who leads decarbonization efforts globally at Google, said the company is looking at using geothermal energy for other data centers worldwide as a portfolio of carbon-free technologies.

“We’re really hoping that this could be a springboard to much, much more advanced geothermal power available to us and others around the world,” he said.

Google announced back in 2020 that it would use carbon-free energy every hour of every day, wherever it operates, by 2030.

Many energy experts believe huge companies like Google can play a catalytic role in accelerating clean energy.

Terrell noted the company was also an early supporter of wind and solar projects, helping those markets take off.

“It’s a very similar situation. Now that we’ve set a goal to be 24/7 carbon-free energy, we have found it will take more than just wind, solar and storage to achieve that goal,” Terrell said in an interview. “And frankly to get power grids to 24/7 carbon-free energy as well, we’re going to need this new set of advanced technologies in energy. Looking at this deal with Fervo, we saw an opportunity to play a role in helping to take these technologies to scale.”

The United States leads the world in using the Earth’s heat energy for electricity generation, but geothermal still accounts for less than half a percent of the nation’s total utility-scale electricity generation, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In 2022, that geothermal power came from California, Nevada, Utah, Hawaii, Oregon, Idaho and New Mexico.

Those are states traditionally thought of as having geothermal potential because there are reservoirs of steam or very hot water close to the surface in the West.

But Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said earlier this year that advances in enhanced geothermal systems will help introduce this form of energy in regions where it’s been thought to be impossible. Granholm was announcing funding for the industry.

Last year, the Energy Department launched an effort to achieve “aggressive cost reductions” in enhanced geothermal systems. This month, in announcing $44 million to advance geothermal deployment nationwide, DOE said the United States has potential for 90 gigawatts of geothermal electricity — the equivalent of powering more than 65 million American homes — by 2050.

Enhanced geothermal companies, including Fervo, are now going after heat deeper below ground, unlocking potential in many more places. Latimer is a former drilling engineer in the oil and gas industry.

Drilling technology and practices drastically improved during the shale boom that transformed the United States into a top oil and gas producer and exporter. But there has been very little tech transfer from the oil and gas industry to geothermal, said Sarah Jewett, vice president of strategy at Fervo.

“They were using all of the old, for lack of a better word, janky stuff from old-school oil and gas development,” she said. “We basically just went to the oil field service companies and said, ‘Give us all your best stuff.’ And we have been using all of the modern drilling technology to do our development.” That has led to far greater efficiency and lower cost, she said.

In a presentation at ClimateTech 2023 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Latimer talked about how Fervo is pioneering horizontal drilling in geothermal reservoirs. In Nevada, Fervo drilled some 8,000 feet down, turned sideways and drilled about 3,250 feet horizontally.

By drilling horizontally, Fervo can reach much more of the hot reservoir, instead of having to have to drill many vertical wells.

Fervo pumps cold water down an injection well, then over hot rock underground to another well, the production well. The path between is created by fracking, or fracturing the rock. The water heats up to nearly 400 degrees Fahrenheit (200 degrees Celsius) before returning to the surface. Once there, it transfers its heat to another liquid with a low boiling point, creating steam. The pressure of steam expanding spins a turbine to produce electricity like in a coal or natural gas-fired plant. The geothermal water, now cooled, is put back down the injection well to start the cycle again, in a closed-loop system.

Well tests this summer were very favorable, according to Fervo. Latimer wants to replicate them now in as many places as possible, as quickly as possible, to help transition away from coal, oil and natural gas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The venture capital firm DCVC invested $31 million in Fervo last year, said Rachel Slaybaugh, a partner there. They did it, she said, because Fervo was ready to add power to the grid while competitors weren’t there yet. Slaybaugh said it’s a plus that Latimer used to run a drill rig— it was the right team, who knew what kind of company they were building.

Both Fervo and Google said geothermal is valuable as an “always-on” clean technology that can be scaled up before 2030 as the world tries to cut its greenhouse gas emissions. Fervo’s next project, in Beaver County, Utah is slated to begin delivering clean power to the grid in 2026 and reach full production in 2028.

“This is unlocking something deeply sought after in the market today as we transition away from fossil fuels, and that is, round-the-clock renewable energy,” Jewett said.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — A top Google executive testified Thursday that the company’s success is precarious and said its leadership fears their product could slide into irrelevance with younger internet users.

Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president for knowledge and information products, testified for the tech giant as it defends itself in the biggest antitrust trial in the last 25 years. The government has accused the company of illegally thwarting competitors from making inroads against its ubiquitous search engine.

Raghavan downplayed Google’s dominance and described it as a company beset by competitors on all sides. He said the company has been tagged with the disparaging moniker “Grandpa Google” among younger demographics who don’t see it as an interesting product.

“Grandpa Google knows the answers and will help you with homework,” Raghavan said. “But when it comes to doing interesting things, they like to start elsewhere.”

Google’s lawyers showed Raghavan a 1998 article from Fortune magazine which said “Yahoo! has won the search-engine wars and is poised for much bigger things.”

Raghavan, who once worked at Yahoo!, said Google spends massive amounts on research and development to try to stay ahead of the curve as technology evolves.

“I feel a keen sense not to become the next roadkill,” he said.

He cited a long list of innovations Google has made to its search engine over the last 20-plus years, from changing the way advertisers bid for space on a search results page to improving the match between what a user types in his query to the results he is actually seeking.

The Justice Department has presented evidence that Google secured its dominance in search by paying billions of dollars annually to Apple and other companies to lock in Google as the default search engine on iPhones and other popular products.

A Microsoft executive also testified that Google’s pre-eminent position becomes self-fulfilling, as it uses the data it aggregates from the billions of searches it conducts to improve the efficiency of future searches.

Google says its search engine is dominant because it has a better product than its competitors. The company said it invested in mobile devices and other emerging technologies more quickly than competitors like Microsoft, and that those investments are now paying off.

And it cited evidence that consumers switch their search engine to Google the majority of the time in cases where another search engine is offered as the default choice.

Raghavan, in his testimony, also said Google’s competition is not just traditional search engines like Microsoft’s Bing, but various “verticals” like Expedia or Yelp that people use to to facilitate travel or dining.

“We feel ourselves competing with them every day,” he said.

The antitrust case, the biggest since the Justice Department went after Microsoft and its dominance of internet browsers 25 years ago, was filed in 2020 during the Trump administration. The trial began last month, and Google is expected to present its case over the next month.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta is not expected to rule until early next year. If he decides Google broke the law, another trial will determine how to rein in its market power. One option would be to prohibit Google from paying companies to make Google a default search engine.

Google is also facing a similar antitrust lawsuit filed by the Justice Department in Alexandria, Virginia, over its advertising technology. That case has not yet gone to trial.

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If government regulators prevail against Google in the biggest U.S. antitrust trial in a quarter century, it’s likely to unleash drastic changes that will undermine the dominance of a search engine that defines the internet for billions of people.

As the 10-week trial probing Google’s business practices nears its midway point, it’s still too early to tell if U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta will side with the Justice Department and try to handcuff one of the world’s most dominant tech companies.

If Mehta rules that Google has been running an illegal monopoly in search, the punishment could open up new online avenues for consumers and businesses to explore in pursuit of information, entertainment and commerce.

“The judge can compel Google to open the floodgates so more startups and third-party competitors can put greater competitive pressure on Google, which will create higher quality online services,” said Luther Lowe, senior vice president of public policy at Yelp. The online business review site has been one of Google’s harshest critics while spending more than a decade railing against a strategy that favors its own services in search results.

Google’s search engine earned its huge market share by almost instantaneously presenting people with helpful information culled from the billions of websites that have been indexed since former Stanford University graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the technology during the late 1990s.

In addition to its technological wizardry, Google also pays billions of dollars each year to ensure its search engine is the default choice for answering queries entered in the world’s most popular smartphones and web browsers.

These agreements don’t preclude users from switching to a different search engine in their settings, but it’s a tedious process that few people bother to navigate. This reality is why Google is willing to pay so much for the privileged position, according to the Justice Department.

Google’s payments for preeminent search placement — including an estimated $15 billion to $20 billion per year to Apple alone — are at the head of the Justice Department’s case, making it probable the judge would prohibit them if he rules against Google.

Should that happen, experts believe the most likely remedy in the U.S. would be a requirement for smartphones and web browsers to display a palette of different search engines during the setup process. That’s something already being done in Europe, where all indications, so far, are that most people are still opting for Google.

That could be because they believe Google truly is the best search engine — as Google argues in their defense — or they just trust the brand more than rival options such as Microsoft’s Bing or the privacy-focused DuckDuckGo.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella asserted Google has an almost hypnotic hold on users while testifying earlier this month during the trial.

“You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth and you search on Google,” Nadella said. He then added that the only way to break the habit is by changing the default choice.

As long as a ruling doesn’t exclude Google’s rivals from paying to be the automatic search engine on smartphones and web browsers, Microsoft could buy the default position for Bing — an opportunity Nadella indicated he would seize.

“There’s defaults — the only thing that matter in terms of changing search behavior,” Nadella testified.

Florian Schaub, associate professor of information at the University of Michigan, believes the fairest outcome in the trial would an across-the-board ban on all default agreements between two companies.

“The current environment is being shaped by an architecture that’s designed by the big companies that control the space,” Schaub said. “What the government can do is inject some neutralism into this and give consumers some actual choices. If people still choose to use Google, that is at least a consumer choice, which would better than having people stick to a default because they are conditioned to that default.”

In his testimony during the trial, Apple executive Eddy Cue said the company has embraced Google as the preferred search engine on the iPhone and other products because it provides the best experience for its customers. That stance has raised speculation that if Apple is blocked from using Google as the default search engine on the iPhone, it might flex its muscle as the world’s richest company to develop its own search technology.

However, a blanket ban on default search agreements that have been highly profitable for Apple and other companies such as wireless provider Verizon could trigger unintended consequences, such as raising prices on other popular products.

“If Google is no longer paying big bucks to Apple and other companies, they might raise the prices for their devices,” said David Olson, an associate professor for the Boston College Law School who is following the antitrust trial. “I don’t think they will be big, but we could see some price increases because Google has essentially been subsidizing the cost of devices like the iPhone.”

Another offshoot of a ban on default search agreements is that Google still could have a dominant advantage in search if people continue to proactively choose it and the company would have billions of dollars more to spend in other areas that it once devoted to deals that it really didn’t need at all.

“Google must think they getting a great benefit from those default agreements, but maybe they’re really not worth that much,” Olson said. “Maybe their cost/benefit analysis is off and they will wind up more money and just as much dominance. That would be ironic.”

Although the trial is focused on Google’s search engine, a government victory could have more sweeping consequences across the technology industry if Mehta decided all default settings are anti-competitive and outlaws all defaults in the settings.

“If one of the outcomes of the trial is that there needs to be more neutral choices, it wouldn’t just affect Google on Android phones, it could also affect Apple and the iPhone,” Schaub said. “Does it mean Google phones might have to offer (Apple’s virtual assistant) Siri as an alternative to the Google Assistant? Or would Apple devices have to offer Google Assistant?”

A decision like that would open a crack in the digital wall that Apple has built around the iPhone to give its own software and certain pet products such as Siri exclusive access to the device’s more than 1 billion users, setting the stage for another potential legal battle.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Google will confront a threat to its dominant search engine beginning Tuesday when federal regulators launch an attempt to dismantle its internet empire in the biggest U.S. antitrust trial in a quarter century.

Over the next 10 weeks, federal lawyers and state attorneys general will try to prove Google rigged the market in its favor by locking its search engine in as the default choice in a plethora of places and devices. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta likely won’t issue a ruling until early next year. If he decides Google broke the law, another trial will decide what steps should be taken to rein in the Mountain View, California-based company.

Top executives at Google and its corporate parent Alphabet Inc., as well as those from other powerful technology companies are expected to testify. Among them is likely to be Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who succeeded Google co-founder Larry Page four years ago. Court documents also suggest that Eddy Cue, a high ranking Apple executive, might be called to the stand.

The Justice Department filed its antitrust lawsuit against Google nearly three years ago during the Trump administration, charging that the company has used its internet search dominance to gain an unfair advantage against competitors. Government lawyers allege that Google protects its franchise through a form of payola, shelling out billions of dollars annually to be the default search engine on the iPhone and on web browsers such as Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox.

Regulators also charge that Google has illegally rigged the market in its favor by requiring its search engine to be bundled with its Android software for smartphones if the device manufacturers want full access to the Android app store.

Google counters that it faces a wide range of competition despite commanding about 90% of the internet search market. Its rivals, Google argues, range from search engines such as Microsoft’s Bing to websites like Amazon and Yelp, where consumers can post questions about what to buy or where to go.

From Google’s perspective, perpetual improvements to its search engine explain why people almost reflexively keep coming back to it, a habit that long ago made “Googling” synonymous with looking things up on the internet.

The trial begins just a couple weeks after the 25th anniversary of the first investment in the company — a $100,000 check written by Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim that enabled Page and Sergey Brin to set up shop in a Silicon Valley garage.

Today, Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet, is worth $1.7 trillion and employs 182,000 people, with most of the money coming from $224 billion in annual ad sales flowing through a network of digital services anchored by a search engine that fields billions of queries a day.

The Justice Department’s antitrust case echoes the one it filed against Microsoft in 1998. Regulators then accused Microsoft of forcing computer makers that relied on its dominant Windows operating system to also feature Microsoft’s Internet Explorer — just as the internet was starting to go mainstream. That bundling practice crushed competition from the once-popular browser Netscape.

Several members of the Justice Department’s team in the Google case — including lead Justice Department litigator Kenneth Dintzer — also worked on the Microsoft investigation.

Google could be hobbled if the trial ends in concessions that undercut its power. One possibility is that the company could be forced to stop paying Apple and other companies to make Google the default search engine on smartphones and computers.

Or the legal battle could cause Google to lose focus. That’s what happened to Microsoft after its antitrust showdown with the Justice Department. Distracted, the software giant struggled to adapt to the impact of internet search and smartphones. Google capitalized on that distraction to leap from its startup roots into an imposing powerhouse.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden said Friday that new commitments by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and other companies that are leading the development of artificial intelligence technology to meet a set of AI safeguards brokered by his White House are an important step toward managing the “enormous” promise and risks posed by the technology.

Biden announced that his administration has secured voluntary commitments from seven U.S. companies meant to ensure that their AI products are safe before they release them. Some of the commitments call for third-party oversight of the workings of the next generation of AI systems, though they don’t detail who will audit the technology or hold the companies accountable.

“We must be clear eyed and vigilant about the threats emerging technologies can pose,” Biden said, adding that the companies have a “fundamental obligation” to ensure their products are safe.

“Social media has shown us the harm that powerful technology can do without the right safeguards in place,” Biden added. “These commitments are a promising step, but we have a lot more work to do together.”

A surge of commercial investment in generative AI tools that can write convincingly human-like text and churn out new images and other media has brought public fascination as well as concern about their ability to trick people and spread disinformation, among other dangers.

The four tech giants, along with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and startups Anthropic and Inflection, have committed to security testing “carried out in part by independent experts” to guard against major risks, such as to biosecurity and cybersecurity, the White House said in a statement.

That testing will also examine the potential for societal harms, such as bias and discrimination, and more theoretical dangers about advanced AI systems that could gain control of physical systems or “self-replicate” by making copies of themselves.

The companies have also committed to methods for reporting vulnerabilities to their systems and to using digital watermarking to help distinguish between real and AI-generated images or audio known as deepfakes.

Executives from the seven companies met behind closed doors with Biden and other officials Friday as they pledged to follow the standards.

“He was very firm and clear” that he wanted the companies to continue to be innovative, but at the same time “felt that this needed a lot of attention,” Inflection CEO Mustafa Suleyman said in an interview after the White House gathering.

“It’s a big deal to bring all the labs together, all the companies,” said Suleyman, whose Palo Alto, California-based startup is the youngest and smallest of the firms. “This is supercompetitive and we wouldn’t come together under other circumstances.”

The companies will also publicly report flaws and risks in their technology, including effects on fairness and bias, according to the pledge.

The voluntary commitments are meant to be an immediate way of addressing risks ahead of a longer-term push to get Congress to pass laws regulating the technology.

Some advocates for AI regulations said Biden’s move is a start but more needs to be done to hold the companies and their products accountable.

“A closed-door deliberation with corporate actors resulting in voluntary safeguards isn’t enough,” said Amba Kak, executive director of the AI Now Institute. “We need a much more wide-ranging public deliberation, and that’s going to bring up issues that companies almost certainly won’t voluntarily commit to because it would lead to substantively different results, ones that may more directly impact their business models.”

While voluntary, agreeing to submit to “ red team” tests that poke at their AI systems is not an easy promise, said Suleyman.

“The commitment we’ve made to have red-teamers basically try to break our models, identify weaknesses and then share those methods with the other large language model developers is a pretty significant commitment,” Suleyman said.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has said he will introduce legislation to regulate AI and is working closely with the Biden administration “and our bipartisan colleagues” to build upon the pledges made Friday.

A number of technology executives have called for regulation, and several attended an earlier White House summit in May.

Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a blog post Friday that his company is making some commitments that go beyond the White House pledge, including support for regulation that would create a “licensing regime for highly capable models.”

Some experts and upstart competitors worry that the type of regulation being floated could be a boon for deep-pocketed first-movers led by OpenAI, Google and Microsoft as smaller players are elbowed out by the high cost of making their AI systems adhere to regulatory strictures.

The White House pledge notes that it mostly only applies to models that “are overall more powerful than the current industry frontier,” set by recent models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and image generator DALL-E 2 and similar releases from Anthropic, Google and Amazon.

A number of countries have been looking at ways to regulate AI, including European Union lawmakers negotiating sweeping AI rules for the 27-nation bloc that could restrict applications deemed to have the highest risks.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently said the United Nations is “the ideal place” to adopt global standards and appointed a board that will report back on options for global AI governance by the end of the year.

Guterres also said he welcomed calls from some countries for the creation of a new U.N. body to support global efforts to govern AI, inspired by such models as the International Atomic Energy Agency or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The White House said Friday that it has consulted on the voluntary commitments with a number of countries.

The pledge is heavily focused on safety risks but doesn’t address other worries about the latest AI technology, including the effect on jobs and market competition, the environmental resources required to build the models, and copyright concerns about the writings, art and other human handiwork being used to teach AI systems how to produce human-like content.

Last week, OpenAI and The Associated Press announced a deal for the AI company to license AP’s archive of news stories. The amount it will pay for that content was not disclosed.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — Google on Wednesday disclosed plans to infuse its dominant search engine with more advanced artificial-intelligence technology, a drive that’s in response to one of the biggest threats to its long-established position as the internet’s main gateway.

The gradual shift in how Google’s search engine runs is rolling out three months after Microsoft’s Bing search engine started to tap into technology similar to that which powers the artificially intelligent chatbot ChatGPT, which has created one of Silicon Valley’s biggest buzzes since Apple released the first iPhone 16 years ago.

Google, which is owned by Alphabet Inc., already has been testing its own conversational chatbot called Bard. That product, powered by technology called generative AI that also fuels ChatGPT, has only been available to people accepted from a waitlist. But Google announced Wednesday that Bard will be available to all comers in more than 180 countries and more languages beyond English.

Bard’s multilingual expansion will begin with Japanese and Korean before adding about 40 more languages.

Now Google is ready to test the AI waters with its search engine, which has been synonymous with finding things on the internet for the past 20 years and serves as the pillar of a digital advertising empire that generated more than $220 billion in revenue last year.

“We are at an exciting inflection point,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told a packed developers conference in a speech peppered with one AI reference after another. “We are reimagining all our products, including search.”

More AI technology will be coming to Google’s Gmail with a “Help Me Write” option that will produce lengthy replies to emails in seconds, and a tool for photos called “Magic Editor” that will automatically doctor pictures.

The AI transition will begin cautiously with the search engine that serves as Google’s crown jewel.

The deliberate approach reflects the balancing act that Google must negotiate as it tries to remain on the cutting edge while also preserving its reputation for delivering reliable search results — a mantle that could be undercut by artificial intelligence’s penchant for fabricating information that sounds authoritative.

The tendency to produce deceptively convincing answers to questions — a phenomenon euphemistically described as “hallucinations” — has already been cropping up during the early testing of Bard, which like ChatGPT, relies on still-evolving generative AI technology.

Google will take its next AI steps through a newly formed search lab where people in the U.S. can join a waitlist to test how generative AI will be incorporated in search results. The tests also include the more traditional links to external websites where users can read more extensive information about queried topics. It may take several weeks before Google starts sending invitations to those accepted from the waitlist to test the AI-injected search engine.

The AI results will be clearly tagged as an experimental form of technology and Google is pledging the AI-generated summaries will sound more factual than conversational — a distinct contrast from Bard and ChatGPT, which are programmed to convey more human-like personas. Google is building in guardrails that will prevent the AI baked into the search engine from responding to sensitive questions about health — such as, “Should I give Tylenol to a 3-year-old?” — and finance matters. In those instances, Google will continue to steer people to authoritative websites.

Google isn’t predicting how long it will be before its search engine will include generative AI results for all comers. The Mountain View, California, company has been under intensifying pressure to demonstrate how its search engine will maintain its leadership since Microsoft began to load AI into Bing, which remains a distant second to Google.

The potential threat caused Alphabet’s stock price to initially plunge, although it has recently bounced back to where it stood when Bing announced its AI plans to great fanfare. More recently, The New York Times reported Samsung is considering dropping Google as the default search engine on its widely used smartphones, raising the specter that Apple might adopt a similar tactic with the iPhone unless Google can show its search engine can evolve with what appears to be a forthcoming AI-driven revolution.

Alphabet’s shares surged 4% Wednesday after Google’s wave of AI announcements to finish at $111.75, the highest closing price since Bing began melding with ChatGPT in early February.

As it begins to ingrain AI in its search engine, Google is aiming to make Bard smarter by connecting with the next generation of a massive data set known as a “large language model,” or LLM, that fuels it. The LLM that Bard relies on is dubbed Pathways Language Model, or PaLM. The AI in Google’s search engine will draw upon the next-generation PaLM2 and another technology known as a Multitask Unified Model, or MUM.

Although people will have to wait to see how Google’s search engine will deploy generative AI to find answers, a new tool soon be more broadly available to all users. Google is going to add a new filter called “Perspectives” that will focus on what people are saying online about whatever topic is entered into the search engine. The new feature will be placed along existing search filters for news, images and video.

Besides using its annual tech showcase to tout its prowess in AI, Google also unveiled the first foldable smartphone in its Pixel line-up of gadgets. Google’s entry into a new type of smartphone design that allows users to deploy the device as a mini-tablet too comes nearly three years after Samsung — the leading maker of smartphones powered by Google’s Android software — introduced its first bendable model.

Foldable phones so far have remained a niche market, largely because of prices ranging between $1,500 and $2,000. Last year, about 14 million foldable phones were sold worldwide, accounting for just 1% of overall smartphone shipments, according to the research firm International Data Corp.

Google’s foldable Pixel phone will sell for $1,800 and begin shipping next month. It will unfold with a hinge and, of course, be packed with AI.

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — Google will automatically purge information about users who visit abortion clinics or other places that could trigger legal problems now that the U.S. Supreme Court has opened the door for states to ban the termination of pregnancies.

The company behind the internet’s dominant internet search engine and the Android software that powers most of the world’s smartphones outlined the new privacy protections in a Friday blog post.

Besides automatically deleting visits to abortion clinics, Google also cited counseling centers, fertility centers, addiction treatment facilities, weight loss clinics, and cosmetic surgery clinics as other destinations that will be erased from users’ location histories. Users have always had the option edit their location histories on their own, but Google will proactively do it for them as an added level of protection.

“We’re committed to delivering robust privacy protections for people who use our products, and we will continue to look for new ways to strengthen and improve these protections,” Jen Fitzpatrick, a Google senior vice president, wrote in the blog post.

The pledge comes amid escalating pressure on Google and other Big Tech companies to do more to shield the troves of sensitive personal information through their digital services and products from government authorities and other outsiders.

The calls for more stringent privacy controls were triggered by the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion. That reversal could make abortion illegal in more than a dozen states, raising the specter that records about people’s location, texts, searches and emails could be used in prosecutions against abortion procedures or even for medical care sought in a miscarriage.

Like other technology companies, Google each year receives thousands of government demands for users’ digital records as part of misconduct investigations. Google says it pushes back against search warrants and other demands that are overly broad or appear to be baseless.

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SAN RAMON, Calif. (AP) — Google is postponing a return to the office for most workers until mid-October and rolling out a policy that will eventually require everyone to be vaccinated once its sprawling campuses are fully reopened.

The announcement Wednesday came as the more highly contagious delta variant is driving a dramatic spike in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.

In an email sent to Google’s more than 130,000 employees worldwide, CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is now aiming to have most of its workforce back to its offices beginning Oct. 18 instead of its previous target date of Sept. 1.

The decision also affects tens of thousands of contractors who Google intends to continue to pay while access to its campuses remains limited.

“This extension will allow us time to ramp back into work while providing flexibility for those who need it,” Pichai wrote.

And Pichai disclosed that once offices are fully reopened, everyone working there will have to be vaccinated. The requirement will be first imposed at Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters and other U.S. offices, before being extended to the more than 40 other countries where Google operates.

“This is the stuff that needs to be done, because otherwise we are endangering workers and their families,” said Dr. Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University and a former health commissioner for the city of Baltimore. “It is not fair to parents to be expected to come back to work and sit shoulder-to-shoulder with unvaccinated people who could be carrying a potentially deadly virus.”

Because children under the age of 12 aren’t currently eligible to be vaccinated, parents can bring the virus home to them from the office if they are around unvaccinated colleagues, Wen said.

Various government agencies already have announced demands for all their employees to be vaccinated, but the corporate world so far has been taking a more measured approach, even though most lawyers believe the mandates are legal.

Delta and United airlines are requiring new employees to show proof of vaccination. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are requiring their employees to disclose their vaccination status, but are not requiring staffers to be vaccinated.

Less that 10% of employers have said they intend to require all employees to be vaccinated, based on periodic surveys by the research firm Gartner.

While other major technology companies may follow suit now that Google has taken its stand on vaccines, employers in other industries still may be reluctant, predicted Brian Kopp, chief of research for Gartner’s human resources practice.

“Google is seen as being such a different kind of company that I think it’s going to take one or two more big employers to do something similar in terms of becoming a game changer,” Kopp said.

Google’s vaccine mandate will be adjusted to adhere to the laws and regulations of each location, Pichai wrote, and exceptions will be made for medical and other “protected” reasons.

“Getting vaccinated is one of the most important ways to keep ourselves and our communities healthy in the months ahead,” Pichai explained.

Google’s decision to require employees working in the office to be vaccinated comes on the heels of similar moves affecting hundreds of thousands government workers in California and New York as part of stepped-up measures to fight the delta variant. President Joe Biden also is considering mandating all federal government workers be vaccinated.

The rapid rise in cases during the past month has prompted more public health officials to urge stricter measures to help overcome vaccine skepticism and misinformation.

The vaccine requirement rolling out in California next month covers more than 240,000 government employees. The city and county of San Francisco is also requiring its roughly 35,000 workers to be vaccinated or risk disciplinary action after the Food and Drug Administration approves one of the vaccines now being distributed under an emergency order.

It’s unclear how many of Google’s workers still haven’t been vaccinated. In his email, Pichai described the vaccination rate at the company as high.

Google’s decision to extend its remote-work follows a similar move by another technology powerhouse, Apple, which recently moved its return-to-office plans from September to October, too.

The delays by Apple and Google could influence other major employers to take similar precautions, given that the technology industry has been at the forefront of the shift to remote work triggered by the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Even before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic in March 2020, Google, Apple and many other prominent tech firms had been telling their employees to work from home. This marks the third time Google has pushed back the date for fully reopening its offices.

Google’s vaccine requirement also could embolden other employers to issue similar mandates to guard against outbreaks and minimize the need to wear masks in the office.

While most companies are planning to bring back their workers at least a few days a week, others in the tech industry have decided to let employees do their jobs from remote locations permanently.

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The problem with doctors is that they love to prescribe all kinds of medication, whether necessary or not, and I find that so disturbing that I refuse to even visit a doctor. Sometimes the medication they prescribe is not even for a real ailment, but for the possibility that I am at that age where something maybe, possibly, could be wrong and I should take this medication or that medication just as a precaution. They prescribe what amounts to a preemptive strike.

I remember one visit where the nurse took my blood pressure reading and said that it was high. It was just over the safety mark. I told her that I drove for almost an hour, in heavy traffic, to get to the nearest available doctor that my insurance allowed me to visit, that I had two cups of coffee on the way there, that it took me fifteen minutes to find a parking spot, and another ten to get to the room where we were sitting, that my bladder was so very full and I didn’t have the chance to empty it yet. Of course, my blood pressure was high. I mean how could it not. I would have been surprised if it was normal.

My doctor saw the reading and immediately put me on a low-salt diet and prescribed a pill to control my blood pressure. He didn’t stop there. He added a diabetes medicine because of, yes, my age. He said that people my age are usually on the verge of it; no test really necessary. If he were to test me then and there, we would find my sugar readings to also be high, like my blood pressure. Of course, the six packets of sugar that I had put in each cup of my coffee, wouldn’t have mattered. They were beside the point. Then he added a cholesterol medicine to my regimen, because, as it turned out, my weight was also just above the safety mark. Then for a good measure, he added one more pill, to help control the possibility of a heart attack, because of my high blood pressure, which I was going to control with the initial medication, but never mind that.

When I told him on one of my subsequent visits that my blood pressure is always normal, except when I am sitting in his office, he didn’t like my insinuation. “I am just trying to save your life,” he retorted. I was serious though. My blood pressure was only high when I went to visit my doctor. Of course, all those different, rather strong medications had some unusual side effects. When I told him that I was experiencing shooting pains in my abdomen and thighs after I started taking them, he prescribed yet another one, that is usually for people with epilepsy—yes, you guessed it—to suppress the shooting pains. I told him that even though he was trying to save my life, there was no quality to my life. I was miserable all the time. I stopped going to that doctor and a miracle happened. I started to feel better soon thereafter. My shooting pains slowly disappeared after I stopped taking all those pills.

So back to my dizziness. When I touched my cell phone, I realized that I had the knowledge of the world at my fingertips. I didn’t need to see any doctor when I could see Dr. Google. I could find out in seconds, without stepping out of my office, the causes of, and possibly cures for, my dizziness. Now folks, I am telling you this with all the sincerity in this world and from the bottom of my heart, as your good friend, and as someone with the best intentions, who really cares for you, please, don’t ever Google your symptoms on the Internet.

Dr. Google told me that I may be suffering from Vertigo, or possibly Parkinson’s, or maybe even multiple sclerosis. There may be the possibility of a stroke, or worst, I may be having a heart attack. I may even have a partial paralysis of my limbs, or Heavens to Betsy, I may be pregnant. That would have come across as a real surprise to me, being a male and all that, but it would have been an even bigger surprise to my wife, who would have asked me why she had to suffer through six pregnancies before I decided to take up the mantle.

There’s even a song by Henrik Widegreng, where he gives the same advice. Once you go through the rabbit hole of Googling your symptoms, be prepared to say your final farewells to the loved ones, make sure your will is updated, and buy that burial plot as soon as you can, because almost all of the Internet searches for your symptoms end up with you dying of stroke, heart attack, or cancer. There is even a term that people in the medical field use to describe the resulting anxiety that people suffer from: cyberchondria. Just like hypochondria, but worst. It is like what these professionals suffer from in the first year of their medical school studies.

I did finally figure out why I was feeling dizzy. Earlier in the day, before I had anything to eat, I had taken a strong medicine for my migraine. One of the side effects of that medication, if you take it on an empty stomach, is dizziness. Go figure. It was bad enough to tell my kids that I may possibly be dying. Now, it is even worse, telling them that I am going to live a little while longer. As long as I stay away from any and all medications. I can hear my wife yelling, “Well, you never finish what you start.”

Those of you who may be wondering why I was having a migraine; well, that sentence should make it all clear. I love her to death—most likely MY death.

Muhammad Naeem • Contributed

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