If Google’s new Bard AI didn’t exactly generate the same “wow” effect as ChatGPT, Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed that conversational will eventually come to Google Search. Microsoft has already done that with its Bing chatbot, which is currently available in public preview, and Google appears keen to follow.

“Will people be able to ask questions to Google and engage with LLMs in the context of search? Absolutely,” Mr. Pichai said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. The exec also isn’t worried about AI chatbots possibly disrupting what remains a core business for Google and said that “the opportunity space, if anything, is bigger than before.”

As of today, Google’s Bard AI is available as a limited preview in the US, and users can access it on a dedicated website. However, Pichai said that Google is already testing new search products that allow users to ask follow-up questions, similar to how Microsoft’s Bing chatbot works.

Google won’t be rushing to bring new conversational capabilities to its search engine, however. The company also took its time to release a consumer-facing chatbot, even though it pioneered the large language model technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT. “We were iterating to ship something, and maybe timelines changed, given the moment in the industry,” Pichai told the WSJ.

Recently, the company started a new collaborative effort between its Google Brain and DeepMind units, which were previously working on different AI projects. “I expect a lot more, stronger collaboration, because some of these efforts will be more compute-intensive, so it makes sense to do it at a certain scale together,” Pichai said.

Lastly, Google is planning to upgrade its Bard AI with Pathways, a new AI architecture that can handle several tasks simultaneously. Google has also made its Pathways Language model accessible to developers using the Google Cloud Platform, and Pichai expects to see companies create smaller AI models and contribute to making AI technology more accessible.