If Google has its way, there will be no search bars, no search terms, no searching (at least not by humans). The very tool that has defined the company—and perhaps the entire internet—for nearly three decades could soon be overtaken by a chatbot. Last month, at its annual software conference, Google launched “AI Mode,” the most drastic overhaul to its search engine in the company’s history.
The feature is different from the AI summaries that already show up in Google’s search results, which appear above the usual list of links to outside websites. Instead, AI Mode functionally replaces Google Search with something akin to ChatGPT. You ask a question and the AI spits out an answer. Instead of sifting through a list of blue links, you can just ask a follow-up. Google has begun rolling out AI Mode to users in the U.S. as a tab below the search bar (before “Images,” “Shopping,” and the like). The company said it will soon introduce a number of more advanced, experimental capabilities to AI Mode, at which point the feature could be able to write a research report in minutes, “see” through your smartphone’s camera to assist with physical tasks such as a DIY crafts project, help book restaurant reservations, make payments. Whether AI Mode can become as advanced and as seamless as Google promises remains far from certain, but the firm appears to be aiming for something like an everything app: a single tool that will be able to do just about everything a person could possibly want to do online.
Seemingly every major tech company is after the same goal. OpenAI markets ChatGPT, for instance, as able to write code and summarize documents, help shop, produce graphics, and, naturally, search the web. Elon Musk is notoriously obsessed with the idea of turning X into an everything app. Meta says you can use its AI “for everything you need”; Amazon calls its new, generative AI–powered Alexa+ “an assistant available to help any time you want”; Microsoft bills its AI Copilot as a companion “for all you do”; and Apple has marketed Apple Intelligence and a revamped Siri as tools that will revolutionize how people use their iPhones (which encompass, for many users, everything). Even Airbnb, once focused simply on vacation rentals, is redesigning itself as a place where “you can sell and do almost anything,” as its CEO, Brian Chesky, recently said.
In a sense, everything apps are the logical conclusion of Silicon Valley’s race to build artificial “general” intelligence, or AGI. A bot smart enough to do anything obviously would be used to power a product that can, in effect, do anything. But such apps would also represent the culmination of the tech industry’s aim to entrench its products in daily lives. Already, Google has features for shopping, navigation, data storage, work software, payment, travel—plus an array of smartphones, tablets, smart-home gadgets, and more. Apple has a similarly all-encompassing suite of offerings, and Meta’s three major apps (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) each have billions of users. Perhaps the only thing more powerful than these sprawling tech ecosystems is boiling them all down to a single product.
That these tech companies can even realistically have such colossal ambitions to build everything apps is a result of their existing dominance. The industry has spent years collecting information about our relationships, work, hobbies, and interests—all of which is becoming grist for powerful AI tools. A key feature of these everything apps is that they promise to be individually tailored, drawing on extensive personal data to provide, in theory, a more seamless experience. Your past search history, and eventually your emails, can inform AI Mode’s responses: When I typed line up into AI Mode, I got the “line up” for the day’s New York Mets game (the Mets are my favorite baseball team). When I typed the same phrase into traditional Google Search, I got a definition.
In other words, the rise of AI-powered everything apps is a version of the bargain that tech companies have proposed in the past with social media and other tools: our services for your data. Meta’s AI assistant can draw on information from users’ Facebook and Instagram accounts. Apple describes its AI as a “personal intelligence” able to glean from texts, emails, and notes on your device. And ChatGPT has a new “memory” feature that allows the chatbot to reference all previous conversations. If the technology goes as planned, it leads to a future in which Google, or any other Big Tech company, knows you are moving from Texas to Chicago and, of its own accord, offers to order the winter jacket you don’t own to be delivered to your new apartment, already selected from your favorite brand, in your favorite color. Or it could, after reading emails musing about an Italian vacation, suggest an in-budget itinerary for Venice that best fits your preferences.
There is, of course, no shortage of reasons to think that AI models will not be capable and reliable enough to power a true everything app. The Mets lineup that Google automatically generated for me wasn’t entirely accurate. Chatbots still invent information and mess up basic math; concerns over AI’s environmental harms and alleged infringement of intellectual-property rights could substantially slow the technology’s development. Only a year ago, Google released AI Overviews, a search feature that told users to eat rocks and use glue to stick cheese to pizza. On the same day that Google released AI Mode, it also introduced an experimental AI shopping tool that can be easily used to make erotic images of teenagers, as I reported with my colleague Lila Shroff. (When we shared our reporting with the company, Google emphasized the protections it has in place and told us it would “continue to improve the experience.”) Maybe AI Mode will order something two sizes too large and ship to the wrong address, or maybe it’ll serve you recommendations for Venice Beach.
Despite these embarrassments, Google and its major AI competitors show no signs of slowing down. The promised convenience of everything apps is, after all, alluring: The more products of any one company you use, and the better integrated those products are, the more personalized and universal its everything app can be. Google even has a second contender in the race—its Gemini model, which, at the same conference, the company said will become a “universal AI assistant.” Whether through Search or Gemini the company seems eager to integrate as many of its products and as much of its user data as possible.
On the surface, AI and the everything app seem set to dramatically change how people interact with technology—consolidating and streamlining search, social media, officeware, and more into a chatbot. But a bunch of everything apps vying for customers feels less like a race for innovation and more like empires warring over territory. Tech companies are running the same data-hungry playbook with their everything apps as they did in the markets that made them so dominant in the first place. Even OpenAI, which has evolved from a little-known nonprofit to a Silicon Valley behemoth, appears so eager to accumulate user data that it reportedly plans to launch a social-media network. The technology of the future looks awfully reliant on that of the past.
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