Just two years ago, Google looked like it was in trouble. In a desperate move to play catch up with the OpenAI chatbot that had upended the tech industry, the search giant debuted an unpolished version of its artificial intelligence on Google.com. The AI spat out shoddy information, including advice for people to eat rocks and put glue on their pizza.

Google’s reign over the internet seemed at risk.

But today, consensus is forming in Silicon Valley that Google has not only recovered and caught up but that it could actually win the AI race, a testament to how so much can change in so little time.

Google on Tuesday announced at Google I/O, its conference for software developers, that in only one year the number of people regularly using its chatbot, Gemini, had more than doubled to 900 million, on a par with OpenAI’s self-reported number of active users for ChatGPT and nearly 30 times the estimated web traffic of Anthropic’s Claude chatbot, which is more focused on business customers.

And unlike Anthropic and OpenAI, which are still losing money from operating expensive AI data centers, Google is rapidly developing ways to use AI to increase profit with online advertising, its bread and butter. In its last quarter, Google reported that its advertising revenue rose 16% to $77 billion, fueled by AI technology that has helped marketers collect deeper information about users’ interests.

Pretty soon, Gemini will become a staple on a competitor’s platform: Apple’s iPhone. Google and Apple said in January that Gemini would become the foundational AI technology for a future version of Siri, Apple’s voice assistant. Gemini is already included on Android devices, so the partnership with Apple will, in effect, bake Gemini into virtually all of the world’s phones.

At I/O this week, Google shared its vision for how it would use AI to increase sales for online retailers, including through a new type of shopping cart that automatically surfaces promotions to shoppers.

The company also said it was continuing to add its AI into tools that people use every day — for instance, by letting a person using Google Docs ask Gemini to draft a speech that includes personal anecdotes and jokes.

“If I had to put a wager on the biggest winner of AI, I would say it’s Google,” said Gary Rivlin, a former New York Times reporter who wrote a book about the tech industry’s race to cash in on AI.

“If you asked me that same question a year and a half ago, the answer wouldn’t have been Google,” he added.

Google’s success with Gemini is a case study in how even a juggernaut can seemingly transform itself overnight to remain dominant. But past incumbents faced with similar existential threats did not have the same story.

The Smartphone Era Left Microsoft Behind

About 15 years ago, Microsoft, whose leadership in personal computing was challenged by the rise of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android ecosystems, failed to stay relevant in the mobile phone era even after releasing its Windows Phone devices and acquiring handset maker Nokia for $7.2 billion. Microsoft remains extremely profitable thanks to business customers, and it has a large video game business, but it no longer leads the pack among consumers.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)

Instead of isolating Gemini, Google reinvented itself by blending AI into all of its most important products. To name a few: There is a team working on Gemini for Gmail, another team working on Gemini inside Google Maps and yet another team focused on the Gemini chatbot app.

Google is also in a position to use AI to capitalize on the travel industry. Gemini is the only chatbot with native access to Google Flights and Google Hotels for looking up airfare and lodging, which makes it a superior travel agent.

To put it another way: What Google has that other AI companies lack is cultural cachet. And with the Gemini model integrated into so many popular services that people rely on every day for work and play, Google has made it much more likely that people will interact with its AI, said Carolina Milanesi, president of Creative Strategies, a consumer technology research firm.

“It’s not about just how good the model is, but where it is and how easy it is for people to discover Gemini and then use it and get value,” Milanesi said.

Google clearly leaned into its advantages to improve its technology. It made AI-generated answers a permanent fixture on Google.com — still the most visited website in the world — without giving users the ability to opt out of seeing them.

Despite making glaring mistakes about the nutritional value of rocks, among other errors, in its early days, Google quickly honed the model. But there is still some work to do. A recent analysis from the Times concluded that Google’s AI-generated responses were correct 90% of the time. Google disputed the study and argued that its answers were more accurate.

“They just have this reach that few of any companies on Earth have,” Rivlin said. “Looking for the next Google? It’s probably Google.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By: Brian X. Chen/Sisi Yu