Google is opening up its artificial intelligence mode to more people in the United States. On Monday, the company announced that it will make the new search tool, first launched early last month, available to millions of Labs users across the country.
For the uninitiated, the AI mode is a new dedicated tab in Search. It is essentially Google’s answer to ChatGPT Search. It allows you to ask Google more complex questions, and a special version of Gemini 2.0 does all the work, providing a sophisticated answer generated by artificial intelligence. Labs is a beta program where you can register your Google account to get access to new Search features before the company launches them to the general public.
In addition to making AI mode available to more people, Google is unlocking the tool’s multimodal capabilities. Starting today, you can take pictures and upload images to AI Mode, allowing you to ask questions about what you see. This feature combines AI mode with Google’s Lens technology.
“With Gemini’s multimodal capabilities, AI mode can understand the entire scene in an image, including the context of how objects relate to each other, as well as their unique materials, colors, shapes, and locations,” Google explains. “Using our query branching technique, AI mode issues multiple queries about the image as a whole and about the objects in it, accessing broader and deeper information than traditional Google searches.”
