Google Is Reaping Rewards of Its Unfair AI Advantage: Dave Lee

With 2 billion monthly users in 200 countries, Google’s AI Overviews can claim to be the most popular generative artificial-intelligence product yet released to the public. The short summaries generated by the company’s Gemini AI model have turned Google from search engine to answer engine, settling the nerves of investors who were worried that ChatGPT was going to smash Google’s business model to pieces.

Then again, to describe those billions as “users,” as parent company Alphabet Inc. did when announcing its quarterly earnings last week, is perhaps disingenuous. No one consciously uses AI Overviews — it’s just there when users perform a regular search ...