By doing this, albeit in their Labs section, Google shows they are considering using some of the most valuable screen real estate on the planet to further promote its Gemini AI models.
A not-so-subtle shift to AI search
Just last week, Apple said it was seeing a drop off from search on its platforms, hinting maybe AI search was the culprit, and said it would add AI models to its search options list.
Apple did, however, say that most AI models were «not good enough» for primetime — as in being the default option.
All out campaign for Gemini
Google is pulling out all the stops lately to increase the user base for it AI offerings, paying «enormous sums» to Samsung to be the default AI and replacing the Google Assistant with a Gemini AI model instead.
This marketing putsch has gained Google some 350 million users, but they are still lagging way behind OpenAI’s 800 million users, which Sam Altman notes is about 10% of the world’s population.
Not all products make it out of Labs
Google notes to CNBC, however, that the company tests a lot of experiments on users of their «Labs,» which requires and opt-in, and added that many of those products do not go on launch broadly.
Read more: CNBC has comments from Google, The Verge was first with the news, Search Engine Roundtable spotted it early, too.