DeepMind co founder warns Google: Traditional search engines will disappear within ten years

Mustafa Suleyman, co founder of DeepMind, an artificial intelligence laboratory, has issued a stern warning to his former employer Google that the internet is about to undergo a fundamental transformation and that old-fashioned search engines will disappear within a decade.In a recent interview on the NoPriors podcast, Suleiman said, "If I were Google, I would be very worried because old-fashioned search engines will no longer exist in ten yearsIn 2010, Suleiman co founded the groundbreaking artificial intelligence company DeepMind with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg

Mustafa Suleyman, co founder of DeepMind, an artificial intelligence laboratory, has issued a stern warning to his former employer Google that the internet is about to undergo a fundamental transformation and that old-fashioned search engines will disappear within a decade.

In a recent interview on the NoPriors podcast, Suleiman said, "If I were Google, I would be very worried because old-fashioned search engines will no longer exist in ten years

In 2010, Suleiman co founded the groundbreaking artificial intelligence company DeepMind with Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg. In 2014, Google acquired it and supported it to continue to develop breakthrough technologies, including the artificial intelligence model AlphaFold that can predict protein structure.

In 2019, Suleiman transferred from DeepMind to Google Vice President. Prior to this, DeepMind had conducted an internal investigation into allegations of employee bullying by Suleiman, and people had been complaining about his behavior for several years. He has apologized for this and stated that he "really messed up".

During Google's final period, Suleiman was dedicated to developing a large language model, LaMDA. He said that he and other colleagues attempted to launch a conversational interactive product using this model, but failed to persuade Google to accept it.

He smiled ruefully and said, "For various reasons, that's not the right time for Google. I just think that dialogue based interactive products will definitely emerge, which will clearly trigger a new wave of technology

Suleiman added, "I believe dialogue is the interface of the future, and Google has adopted dialogue, but the dialogue experience is unbearable

After leaving Google, Suleiman and others co founded a startup called InflectAI. The company recently launched its first product - the personalized chat robot Pi.

If Google's search engine is forced to undergo fundamental changes, it will suffer heavy losses. As the "gatekeeper of the internet," Google crawls, indexes, and ranks countless websites. Almost all of Google's profits come from advertising next to search results. Now, the company is testing its chat robot Bard and applying some of its technologies to search. But no one really knows how Google will make money from this new business model.

Suleiman stated in the NoPriors podcast that with or without Google, the search experience will evolve towards dialogue and interaction, which will have a huge impact on the future of the internet and everyone who relies on it for information and livelihood. Here are more highlights from Suleiman's comments:

The Yellow Pages of the 1980s

When you search on Google, it will display 10 blue links that you can click on to find the answer. This is a page generated by Google search. When you browse it, you can tell Google how long you have spent on it, which links you have clicked on, how much content you have browsed, and so on.

Then, you need to return to the search login page, re-enter the query content, and repeat the above query process again. This is a dialogue, and Google also learns by repeating this process. However, it uses the yellow page dialogue style of the 1980s, and we can now communicate fluently in natural language.

Search engine optimization to the extreme

I think what Google is doing on the internet may be unintentional, but in reality, it has changed the way content is produced to optimize advertising. Now all content has been optimized to the extreme to meet SEO requirements. As a result, the text on the webpage is divided into small pieces and subheadings, and advertisements also separate them, making it take us 5 to 7 or 10 seconds to find the information we want. Most of the time, we only want to know a small piece of information.

When we need to read, the content is usually presented in an awkward format, because if you stay on the page for 11 seconds instead of 5 seconds, Google considers it to be high-quality and attractive content. Therefore, content creators are motivated to keep you on the page, which is detrimental to us as humans require high-quality, concise, fluent, and natural language to answer our questions.

More importantly, we hope to be able to update our answers without thinking about how to change our query. We have learned 'Google Language', which is a strange vocabulary that we have developed together with Google for 20 years. Now, this situation must stop. This era has come to an end, and we can now communicate with computers in smooth and natural language, which is the new search interface.

Everyone will have their own artificial intelligence

We believe that in the coming years, everyone will have their own personal artificial intelligence. These artificial intelligence will include various types such as commercial artificial intelligence, government artificial intelligence, non-profit artificial intelligence, political artificial intelligence, internet celebrity artificial intelligence, and brand artificial intelligence.

Each type of artificial intelligence will have its own goals and be consistent with the owner's goals. We believe that as individuals, we all hope that our artificial intelligence is aligned with our interests. This is the meaning of personal artificial intelligence, which we call Pi, and it will become your partner. We started with a empathy and supportive style and tried to ask ourselves what a good dialogue is.

What changes have taken place in the structure of the internet?

I believe that in the future, the Internet will undergo fundamental changes, with most computing presented in the form of dialogue, and a significant portion of this dialogue will be facilitated by various types of artificial intelligence. For example, Pi can provide you with a news summary in the morning. It will constantly understand your preferences, whether it's cacti or motorcycles. Every few days, it will send you new updates, providing new information in the form of a summary, which is very consistent with your reading style, interests, and preferences for consumer information.

Both traditional websites and the open internet default to a fixed format, believing that everyone needs the same format. And generative artificial intelligence shows us clearly that we can make everything dynamic and completely personalized. If I were Google, I would be very worried because old-fashioned search engines will no longer exist in ten years. This won't happen overnight, there will be transitional time, but these simple and dynamic personalized interactions clearly represent future trends.

Suggestions for content creators

I believe that artificial intelligence is essentially just a website or application. For example, if you have a blog about baking, you can use artificial intelligence to create high-quality content, making your blog more attractive and interactive. Therefore, for me, any brand can be seen as an artificial intelligence, only using static tools.

For hundreds of years, the advertising industry has been using colors, shapes, textures, text, sound, and images to generate meaningful content, but they release new versions every six months or every year. Now, all of this will become more dynamic and interactive. Therefore, I really disagree with the view that there are only one to five artificial intelligence. I think this is completely misleading and fundamentally wrong. In fact, there will be hundreds or billions of artificial intelligence. What we don't want is autonomous artificial intelligence that operates completely independently. They will aimlessly do their own things, which will not produce good results.

If a blogger has their own artificial intelligence to create content, then I can imagine a world where my Pi will communicate with other artificial intelligence, such as saying, "Suleiman is very interested in learning baking, but he can't beat eggs, so where should he start?" Then, there will be interaction between artificial intelligence. When Pi comes back to me, it will say, "Hey, I found a great artificial intelligence today

Perhaps we can chat and you will find many super interesting things. They may record a short video of me interacting with another artificial intelligence, or something similar. I think this will be a new way of content generation. I believe that your personal artificial intelligence will act as a interlocutor into another world. By the way, this is basically what Google is currently doing. Google will crawl other artificial intelligence generated by traditional static methods, interact with them, rank them, and present them to you. (Small)