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Big Tech's AI Endgame Is Coming Into Focus: One app to rule them all (Matteo Wong, The Atlantic)
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/06/everything-app-big-tech-ai-endgame/683024/-snip-
The feature is different from the AI summaries that already show up in Google’s search results, which appear above the usual list of links to outside websites. Instead, AI Mode functionally replaces Google Search with something akin to ChatGPT. You ask a question and the AI spits out an answer. Instead of sifting through a list of blue links, you can just ask a follow-up. Google has begun rolling out AI Mode to users in the United States as a tab below the search bar (before “Images,” “Shopping,” and the like). The company said it will soon introduce a number of more advanced, experimental capabilities to AI Mode, at which point the feature could be able to write a research report in minutes, “see” through your smartphone’s camera to assist with physical tasks such as a DIY crafts project, help book restaurant reservations, make payments. Whether AI Mode can become as advanced and as seamless as Google promises remains far from certain, but the firm appears to be aiming for something like an everything app: a single tool that will be able to do just about everything a person could possibly want to do online.
Seemingly every major tech company is after the same goal. OpenAI markets ChatGPT, for instance, as able to write code and summarize documents, help shop, produce graphics, and naturally, search the web. Elon Musk is notoriously obsessed with the idea of turning X into an everything app. Meta says you can use its AI “for everything you need”; Amazon calls its new, generative AI–powered Alexa+ “an assistant available to help any time you want”; Microsoft bills its AI Copilot as a companion “for all you do”; and Apple has marketed Apple Intelligence and a revamped Siri as tools that will revolutionize how people use their iPhones (which encompass, for many users, everything). Even Airbnb, once focused simply on vacation rentals, is redesigning itself as a place where “you can sell and do almost anything,” as its CEO, Brian Chesky, recently said.
-snip-
In other words, the rise of AI-powered everything apps is a version of the bargain that tech companies have proposed in the past with social media and other tools: our services for your data. Meta’s AI assistant can draw on information from users’ Facebook and Instagram accounts. Apple describes its AI as a “personal intelligence” able to glean from texts, emails, and notes on your device. And ChatGPT has a new “memory” feature that allows the chatbot to reference all previous conversations. If the technology goes as planned, it leads to a future in which Google, or any other Big Tech company, knows you are moving from Texas to Chicago and, of its own accord, offers to order the winter jacket you don’t own to be delivered to your new apartment, already selected from your favorite brand, in your favorite color. Or it could, after reading emails musing about an Italian vacation, suggest an in-budget itinerary for Venice that best fits your preferences.
-snip-
On the surface, AI and the everything app seem set to dramatically change how people interact with technology—consolidating and streamlining search, social media, officeware, and more into a chatbot. But a bunch of everything apps vying for customers feels less like a race for innovation and more like empires warring over territory. Tech companies are running the same data-hungry playbook with their everything apps as they did in the markets that made them so dominant in the first place. Even OpenAI, which has evolved from a little-known nonprofit to a Silicon Valley behemoth, appears so eager to accumulate user data that it reportedly plans to launch a social-media network. The technology of the future looks awfully reliant on that of the past.
The feature is different from the AI summaries that already show up in Google’s search results, which appear above the usual list of links to outside websites. Instead, AI Mode functionally replaces Google Search with something akin to ChatGPT. You ask a question and the AI spits out an answer. Instead of sifting through a list of blue links, you can just ask a follow-up. Google has begun rolling out AI Mode to users in the United States as a tab below the search bar (before “Images,” “Shopping,” and the like). The company said it will soon introduce a number of more advanced, experimental capabilities to AI Mode, at which point the feature could be able to write a research report in minutes, “see” through your smartphone’s camera to assist with physical tasks such as a DIY crafts project, help book restaurant reservations, make payments. Whether AI Mode can become as advanced and as seamless as Google promises remains far from certain, but the firm appears to be aiming for something like an everything app: a single tool that will be able to do just about everything a person could possibly want to do online.
Seemingly every major tech company is after the same goal. OpenAI markets ChatGPT, for instance, as able to write code and summarize documents, help shop, produce graphics, and naturally, search the web. Elon Musk is notoriously obsessed with the idea of turning X into an everything app. Meta says you can use its AI “for everything you need”; Amazon calls its new, generative AI–powered Alexa+ “an assistant available to help any time you want”; Microsoft bills its AI Copilot as a companion “for all you do”; and Apple has marketed Apple Intelligence and a revamped Siri as tools that will revolutionize how people use their iPhones (which encompass, for many users, everything). Even Airbnb, once focused simply on vacation rentals, is redesigning itself as a place where “you can sell and do almost anything,” as its CEO, Brian Chesky, recently said.
-snip-
In other words, the rise of AI-powered everything apps is a version of the bargain that tech companies have proposed in the past with social media and other tools: our services for your data. Meta’s AI assistant can draw on information from users’ Facebook and Instagram accounts. Apple describes its AI as a “personal intelligence” able to glean from texts, emails, and notes on your device. And ChatGPT has a new “memory” feature that allows the chatbot to reference all previous conversations. If the technology goes as planned, it leads to a future in which Google, or any other Big Tech company, knows you are moving from Texas to Chicago and, of its own accord, offers to order the winter jacket you don’t own to be delivered to your new apartment, already selected from your favorite brand, in your favorite color. Or it could, after reading emails musing about an Italian vacation, suggest an in-budget itinerary for Venice that best fits your preferences.
-snip-
On the surface, AI and the everything app seem set to dramatically change how people interact with technology—consolidating and streamlining search, social media, officeware, and more into a chatbot. But a bunch of everything apps vying for customers feels less like a race for innovation and more like empires warring over territory. Tech companies are running the same data-hungry playbook with their everything apps as they did in the markets that made them so dominant in the first place. Even OpenAI, which has evolved from a little-known nonprofit to a Silicon Valley behemoth, appears so eager to accumulate user data that it reportedly plans to launch a social-media network. The technology of the future looks awfully reliant on that of the past.
One chatbot to rule them all. It is a war to grab as many AI users as possible. And of course Elon Musk is part of it and has talked a lot about turning X into an everything app.
With the users as subjects whose data will be scraped, and who will become more and more easily manipulable as the chatbot gathers information about them.
Your friendly, AI-bro controlled chatbot. Confidante, nanny and Big Brother rolled into one.
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