I heard Google leaders say a few years ago that conversational AI or search is not a priority. I was a bit amazed by their thinking and always thought Google is

I heard Google leaders say a few years ago that conversational AI or search is not a priority. I was a bit amazed by their thinking and always thought Google is a bit disconnected from making great products and understanding what customers really want or need, even if they do have the best tech and talent usually in the field of AI. Conversational AI has been such a dream of mine to witness and popularized in sci-fi cultures and here Google was saying that it doesn't feel that important as part of AI innovation. I think that kind of decision making led to working on language models but not for the goal of providing fundamentally better search or intelligent companionship to end users, but more as an addendum to their existing products like Search, Youtube, cloud offerings etc. Now that there is a huge public hype around ChatGPT, they have been forced to revisit their priorities around conversational AI as a standalone customer facing direction. The main challenge here is obviously how to ascertain what is true. I am not sure much work is done in AI research yet or how hard of a problem that is. And that's independent of AI chat as you could apply the "truth" model to any piece of text like fake news, tweets and so on. Without that probabilistic truth model, it is going to be difficult to offer reliable conversational AI or search that one can rely on beyond entertainment or partial/subjective advice. I have no idea how far ahead Google and OpenAI is for "truth modeling".