How Google is planning on destroying its own business model

🏝 TheTechOasis 🏝

Breaking down the most advanced AI systems in easy-to-understand, 5-minute reads

🤯 AI Research of the week 🤯

“If you can’t beat it, join it.”

That’s how the saying goes, and that’s precisely what our dear friend Google is doing regarding AI.

In order to remain king of search, Google is purposely contributing to the demise of its ad-base revenue model, one of the most successful businesses in the history of capitalism.

But you shouldn’t fear for Google’s integrity, as we’ll see today… this is the plan all along.

Now, they have released their newest research on ‘AI-enhanced search’ with the release of AVIS, a powerful new framework for efficient question-answering, Image-based search.

The wake-up call

Anyone who follows the AI industry will probably agree on the fact that we’re approaching the death of Internet search as we know it.

And Google knows it too.

Using ChatGPT or Claude is much more quick and convenient than doing link-based searches.

Thus, Google had two options: Milk the dying cash cow while arguing that AI-search is stupid, or acknowledge the obvious and ride the AI wave so that they stay on top once it becomes a thing.

As Google’s execs aren’t dumb, they’ve gone for the second option.

In fact, there’s no company in the world right now more heavily focused on disrupting search with AI than Google.

For instance, a few weeks ago Google Deepmind released WebAgent, an AI autonomous agent capable of searching the web.

Now, as you’ll see, AVIS is another nail in the coffin for standard Internet search.

Of course, this is horrifying for Google’s ad-based model, which relies heavily on the ads displayed to users while they browse the web.

Source: Visual Capitalist

Although this breakdown is from 2022, it’s safe to say that the picture hasn’t changed at all.

Google’s ‘Search advertising’ represents 60% of the revenue! And that figure grows to a staggering 71% if you consider Google AdMob.

But with solutions like AVIS, the ad-model is suddenly completely broken.

The AVIS framework

Autonomous Visual Information Seeking, or AVIS, is a framework developed by Google to leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to, given an image and a complicated question, have the capacity to dynamically plan, execute tools that provide the required information, and measure its own outputs autonomously until it finds the right answer.

Thus, the AVIS framework is comprised of three distinct elements:

LLM planner: An LLM that, based on the current state and observations, plans what tool and query it needs to get the required information from.

Working Memory: A log that retains the information from past executions.

LLM reasoner: An LLM that, based on the output from the tools, evaluates the obtained information and decides if it needs to progress further or if it’s ready to answer the question.

To better understand, let’s see an example:

Source: Google

Given the image at the top left and the question “When was the drum first used for this event?”, the LLM…

Enjoyed the introduction? Subscribe or sign in to continue with this edition.