I don't really know what it means. It seems to sort of entangle Google Search as a product with a lot of constituent parts and "search" as a specific operation over Google's index of sites. Talking about the product, ML has been a core part of Google's search product for a really long time. AI summaries in Google Search distill information from sites discovered from a "normal" Google search. The Search product, which now incorporates AI, and advertising enabled by it, are still far and away Google's biggest revenue drivers.

If we literally mean AI as in people paying to use/deploy AI via Google, that's still a small part of their revenue, far less than advertising revenue. If we mean AI as in "every Google product that uses ML", then I guess that's been their core product for a long time.

I would say this statement is incorrect, and if I had to guess, it will be for the next 5 years. Google’s main product is ads, followed by search, gmail, and Google Docs suite, and Gemini is not on track to dethrone either any time soon.

In 2016 Google was riding high on DeepMind with Alpha Go, etc. I don't think that it was a big stretch to say they would dominate AI in 10 years. It does if you define the meaning of AI though (LLMs, ML, DRL, etc)

It’s still search. They had an AI based search for quite some time. Now it spits out a summary.

Nah. way before that page/brin wanted to create ai (agi) long before that when google was started or in its infancy, but it seemed completely unbelievable (the kind of stuff elon musk would say)

I can't find the reference to it, but I remember them saying it in wired or similar.

Was Google's main product search in 2016? That doesn't ring true. Google's main product today is not search. Neither is it AI. So I guess 50% is a fair characterization. But that was the floor for that prediction in 2016. So... meh.