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But the thing you have to understand about a search engine is that a search engine is many things. For all the people using Google to find important and hard-to-access scientific information, orders of magnitude more are using it to find their email inbox, get to Walmart’s website, or remember who was president before Hoover. And then there’s my favorite fact of all: that a vast number of people every year go to Google and type “google” into the search box. We mostly talk about Google as a research tool, but in reality, it’s asked to do anything and everything you can think of, billions of times a day.

The real question in front of all these would-be Google killers, then, is not how well they can find information. It’s how well they can do everything Google does. So I decided to put some of the best new AI products to the real test: I grabbed the latest list of most-Googled queries and questions according to the SEO research firm Ahrefs and plugged them into various AI tools. In some instances, I found that these language model-based bots are genuinely more useful than a page of Google results. But in most cases, I discovered exactly how hard it will be for anything — AI or otherwise — to replace Google at the center of the web.

People who work in search always say there are basically three types of queries. First and most popular is navigation, which is just people typing the name of a website to get to that website. Virtually all of the top queries on Google, from “youtube” to “wordle” to “yahoo mail,” are navigation queries. In actual reality, this is a search engine’s primary job: to get you to a website.

Brands want to use generative AI to personalize their marketing efforts — but they are also deathly afraid of AI going off message and ruining their brand. At its annual Summit conference in Las Vegas, Adobe today announced GenStudio, a new application that helps brands create content and measure its performance, with generative AI — and the promise of brand safety — at its center.

Currently, the tool is mostly focused on helping social, paid media and lifecycle marketers that want to create social media posts, email campaigns and display ads, with support for creating entire websites coming soon.

Adobe wants GenStudio, which it first previewed last September, to be an end-to-end solution to help marketers tailor their content to different channels and audience segments. It includes tools for content creation, managing campaigns and analytics. But to generate personalized content, you need a supply chain that makes it easy to generate a lot of on-brand content — and then the tools to measure how this content performs.

A select group of artists, designers and filmmakers have now had a couple of months to play with OpenAI’s new Sora text-to-video tool, and on Monday, OpenAI shared some of their creations and first impressions.

“As great as Sora is at generating things that appear real, what excites us is its ability to make things that are totally surreal,” Toronto-based multimedia production company Shy Kids said in a statement accompanying Air Head, a short film it made with Sora. The word surreal aptly describes the video, which stars a guy with a yellow balloon for a noggin.

“I am literally filled with hot air,” he says.