The You search engine remains ahead of Google and Bing in conversational search. After launching its ChatGPT-style AI, the site is launching multimodal conversational research. In other words, this search engine can combine text with images, graphics, etc. Alas, that doesn’t make it more reliable.
Tech giants like Microsoft and Google may have a serious competitor in front of them in conversational search. You has always been committed to staying one step ahead of the two web giants. This search engine does not come from anywhere: its CEO Richard Socher worked at Salesforce or MetaMind before founding the company in 2021. Last December, You.com implemented conversational search, a kind of ChatGPT connected to the Internet. Just like the new Bing, it cites its sources when responding. While Google uses multimodal search on one side and conversational search on the other with Bard, You merges the two.
You goes multimodal search by AI
On February 7, You.com announced YouChat2.0, evolution of YouChat, the ” AI search assistant that helps you find answers to complex questions“. It is based on the CAL language model developed by the company. This evolution of YouChat makes it possible to chat with the “ search engine to receive real-time results in a variety of rich media modalities, including graphics, images, video, tables, charts, text, and code“, can we read on the announcement ticket.
The most telling example is that you can chat with the AI and at any time ask it to generate an image by AI via Stable Diffusion. A strange behavior is also to be noted: sometimes, the platform indicates that it cannot generate the said image, but immediately offers to create it anyway. You can also ask YouChat to generate tables, such as laptop comparisons.
Another use case put forward by You.com: the possibility of integrating the stock prices of a company or a cryptocurrency during the conversation, which Bard does not plan to do and which Bing does not do for example. However, just like Bing, we keep search results associated with the request. For Richard Socher, “ it’s a big step forward in making big language models multimodal in the sense that the different modalities are text, but also code, tables, charts and images and interactive elements — and sometimes that’s the best way to answer your question. I sincerely believe that this way of representing the answer to this question is better than any text “, he toldTechCrunch.
Much bigger gaps than Bing or ChatGPT
What we quickly notice when using You is that it is still more limited than ChatGPT or Bing. Factual errors are numerous, especially when the answer is not sourced with links to web pages. So indeed, Google screwed up with Bard, Microsoft also with Bing during their respective conferences. But the overall level of You remains lower, even if it should be remembered that the program is in the beta phase.
For now, You has announced that it wants to add more apps available for search. If YouChat 2.0 has improved the reliability of the information given, there is still a lot of work to be done in this area. Besides, we don’t know much about CAL, the language model behind the conversational agent of You and Richard Socher is very discreet about it. However, he specifies that at some point he will reveal how his artificial intelligence works.
You’s strategy for the next few months
In his interview withTechCrunchthe CEO of You Richard Socher does not go out of his way: for him, “Google is a monolithic, monopolistic, closed search engine that has ended up weaponizing AI against users to serve its true purpose: advertising.You, on the other hand, would grow by double digits every month and be used by millions of people. According to the SimilarWeb site, You.com would record nearly 16 million visits per month (January 2023).
The question that comes after this excellent growth is that of monetization: You is and remains above all a company and must generate income to ensure its sustainability. In the field of search engines, this question is essential and is even more so when we talk about conversational AI. It’s hard to monetize an internet-connected ChatGPT, and that’s part of why Google was reluctant to launch Bard. But for Richard Socher, the stakes of his company are not the same as those of Google or Microsoft: “we don’t have to make $500 million a day. We don’t have that pressure at the moment as a startup. But we will think about monetization this year, and we will try to explore different ways“.
On the other hand, You doesn’t have the ecosystem of Google or Microsoft. We know that Google is working to integrate Bard on Chromebooks to make it more accessible. Same story with its competitor: the GPT language model will soon arrive in Office.
The mediaTechCrunchspecifies in the report that this could include private advertisements, but also a system of subscriptions to modules for various uses: writing blog articles or essays. Also, You might open to “the creation of third-party applications, such as the Stock application which displays a stock chart.» The CEO of You is realistic and says that «sure the competition is tough and you need to build something that is both unique and different, but at the same time good enough to support most of the things people currently expect from their search engine“.
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