Search engine technology startup You.com has announced the launch of YouChat 2.0, a groundbreaking new “multimodal conversational AI” system that the company says will take the internet search experience to “a whole new level,” leaving search engine giant Google wondering what happened!
The company says that YouChat 2.0 is the first web search that combines advanced conversational AI with community-built apps, offering a unique and interactive experience with each query. Its blended large language model, known as C-A-L (Chat, Apps, and Links), serves up charts, images, videos, tables, graphs, text, or code embedded in its responses to user queries. The idea is fewer open tabs and less drifting away from your search engine.
“We already have 150+ apps in our main search results page, but we’re now pulling more into the chat world and into this chat interface, which is non-trivial because you basically have to allow the chat model to decide when is best to answer a question by just showing you the facts,” said You.com co-founder and CEO Richard Socher in an interview with VentureBeat. “No one has done this yet — we’re the first to launch it to the world publicly.”
Socher knows a thing or two about groundbreaking advances in natural language processing (NLP), the technology that underpins all popular search engines. According to Google Scholar, Socher is currently the fourth most cited researcher in the field. As former chief scientist (and EVP) at Salesforce and former adjunct professor at Stanford’s computer science department, Socher has built his career on novel NLP applications. He now thinks it’s time to reimagine the way we interact with traditional search engines.
“Google has done incredible research and propelled the field forward in many dimensions in terms of its research, but they are making $150 billion a year by invading your privacy and showing you ads on a search results page,” Socher said, appearing visibly frustrated with the current state of affairs. “So when you develop technology, that would work great if, instead of six ads, you had one ad, but [if] it means you lose $500 million a day, you’re probably not incentivized to launch that new technology into the world.”
“It’s the classic innovator’s dilemma,” he added. “Google is very good at running things not profitably for a long time, like Maps and YouTube, and then pulling ads into it. The problem is this particular technology changes their core product.”
The company invites developers to submit apps to its open platform and work together to create the ultimate chat-search-do engine. Developers can learn more at You.com’s developers page.
How BigRio Helps Bring Advanced AI Solutions to the Internet Experience
The announcement of YouChat 2.0 by You.com is yet another example of how innovative startups are advancing the ubiquity of AI and NLP. AI algorithms are already “running behind the scenes” of most of our internet and social media experiences, and soon they will be little or no separation between Internet of Things applications, chat, and AI, with one very much totally reliant on and integrated with the other.
BigRio prides itself on being a facilitator and incubator for such advances in leveraging AI to improve the digital world.
In fact, we like to think of ourselves as a “Shark Tank for AI.”
If you are familiar with the TV series, then you know that, basically, what they do is hyper-accelerate the most important part of the incubation process – visibility. You can’t get better visibility than getting out in front of celebrity investors and a TV audience of millions of viewers. Many entrepreneurs who have appeared on that program – even those who did not get picked up by the Sharks – succeeded because others who were interested in their concepts saw them on the show.
At BigRio, we may not have a TV audience, but we can do the same. We have the expertise to not only weed out the companies that are not ready for the market, as the sharks on the TV show do but also mentor and get those that we feel are readily noticed by the right people in the AI investment community.
You can read much more about how AI is redefining the Internet of Things in my new book Quantum Care: A Deep Dive into AI for Health Delivery and Research. While the book’s primary focus is on healthcare delivery, it also takes a deep dive into AI in general, with specific chapters on IoT and NLP technologies.
Rohit Mahajan is a Managing Partner with BigRio. He has a particular expertise in the development and design of innovative solutions for clients in Healthcare, Financial Services, Retail, Automotive, Manufacturing, and other industry segments.
BigRio is a technology consulting firm empowering data to drive innovation, and advanced AI. We specialize in cutting-edge Big Data, Machine Learning, and Custom Software strategy, analysis, architecture, and implementation solutions. If you would like to benefit from our expertise in these areas or if you have further questions on the content of this article, please do not hesitate to contact us.