Attendees at Google’s 2023 I/O developer conference must’ve thought they were at “Google AI,” instead.
“As you may have heard, AI is having a very busy year,” Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said to open the event.
This, as the tech giant used Wednesday’s (May 10) annual conference to introduce new integrations of artificial intelligence (AI) features across virtually all of its core products.
Observers, as well as investors, viewed the AI-centric unveiling as the latest salvo in an ongoing battle between Alphabet Inc.’s Google and its tech sector competitors, like Microsoft.
The company’s stock remains trading at its highest level since last August as the market continues to respond positively to Google’s plans to stay at the forefront of AI.
Microsoft is already licensing AI technology, including the buzzy ChatGPT solution, from the unicorn startup OpenAI across its own suite of both consumer and enterprise software products.
Other tech giants including Meta Platforms, Amazon and others, aren’t far behind, either.
“We’re at an exciting inflection point,” Pichai told the 2023 I/O attendees. “[Google has] an opportunity to make AI even more helpful for people, for businesses, for communities, for everyone.”
Read more: The Race to Regulate AI Risks Could Reshape Global Markets
At the same time that the Google I/O conference was happening, Robinhood Markets Co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev was separately on the phone telling investors during his company’s first-quarter 2023 earnings call that “every company will have to transition into an AI company.”
But Google, which will turn 25 years old this September, made sure to use its developer conference to remind the world that for much of its history it has already been an AI-driven business.
In fact, Google is responsible for inventing much of the core technology powering today’s contemporary AI frenzy.
The letter “T” in ChatGPT stands for “transformer,” a large language model (LLM) technology that was first invented at Google.
As part of the MIDAS (Mining Data At Stanford) group in the mid-to-late ‘90s, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page first uncovered the concept of dynamic data mining which completely transformed association algorithms in order to effectively surface information from the near-infinite parameters of the then still emergent world wide web.
Now, Google’s massive LLMs are being woven into and leveraged across the bulk of the services the tech company offers.
Pichai previously called AI and its implications across business and society “more profound than fire or electricity,” emphasizing that the technology will “impact every product across every company.”
See also: If AI Can Replace Employees, It Can Also Replace Vendors
“Seven years into our journey as an AI-first company, we’re at an exciting inflection point,” Pichai said. “We’ve been applying AI to make our products radically more helpful for a while. With generative AI, we’re taking the next step [in] reimagining all our core products.”
Company leaders highlighted that one key use case they believe generative AI is particularly well-suited for is in providing recommendations for end-users leveraging Google’s search capabilities to research what to buy online.
As part of that next step, Google has made its AI chatbot, Bard, freely available for much of the world to use online, and introduced a next-generation LLM called PaLM 2 for developers to use as they train their own future-fit AI tools, including other chatbots.
Google has already woven the PaLM 2 model update into its suite of marquee products like Google Workspace.
The LLM will power new services like the freshly introduced Duet AI, a collaborative tool that uses generative AI capabilities to help users with a range of tasks, from providing input on their own code to supporting the creation of no-code applications.
Three new AI models were also announced at the conference, Codey, Imagen and Chirp.
As hinted at by their names, Codey is meant to use AI to help with coding, Imagen leverages generative capabilities for image creation, and Chirp taps AI to process speech and voice.
The solutions are all meant to reduce the manual burden of legacy tasks and streamline workflows.
As PYMNTS reported, while business interests are pushing AI forward, many academics, technologists and researchers continue to warn about the technology’s danger absent appropriate guardrails around its use — including Google’s own Dr. Geoffrey Hinton who resigned in advance of the I/O conference in order to “speak freely” about the potential risks that widespread integration of the technology may pose.
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