evidence: Google, for its part, has upped its underlying capabilities with the release of Gemini, a set of multimodal large language models with similar capabilities to OpenAI. Gemini, also trained on content from the internet as well as other sources, can operate across text, images, audio, and video and will power Google’s Bard chatbot and all of its search generative experiences. Google has already rolled out an experimental version of AI-generated search in more than 100 countries (see example below) which can be triggered by text or voice queries. Google has been careful to include links to websites from which content has been drawn, but there are fewer of them and publishers worry that there will be even less reason to click on them. [...] If chatbots can seem a bit dry and boring, this year is likely to see an injection of a bit more sparkle. Meta recently announced a series of AI assistants based on US celebrities such as social media influencer Charli D’Amelio and American footballer Tom Brady. These bots, built with the full cooperation of the stars involved, are themed around passions such as sport, dancing, and gaming but can answer questions on a wide range of topics using a range of generative animations. Designed to make chatbots more fun, these AI celebrities will appear across multiple platforms including the metaverse. Publishers are already experimenting with news bots based on custom data,36 so adding the face and personality of a trusted journalist could be the next step.