If there was any doubt that Google is going all-in on AI, its developer conference should have put that to rest. While the company unveiled some long-awaited hardware, including the Pixel 7a smartphone, the Google Pixel Fold, and the Pixel tablet, artificial intelligence and the role it will play in Google’s products in the future was definitely the star of the show.
Perhaps it was as an answer to criticisms in the past few weeks that the tech giant has fallen behind the curve on AI. With OpenAI on the advance, Google has chosen to go the route of “AI with everything”. That included both consumer and business-focused products and sent a clear message: AI is the future, and Google is ready.
All in all, Google made more than 100 announcements at the conference this week. That included AI powered search, the expansion of its AI chatbot Bard to 180 countries, and an Immersive View for Google Maps that will allow you to visualise every step of your route before you step outside your front door. Among the cities launching for the latter in the coming months are Dublin, London, Paris, Berlin and Amsterdam.
Google is also planning to integrate Bard with more third-party services, and add an AI collaborator to Docs, Gmail, Slides and Sheets that helps people draft replies to messages and write documents.
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But with one eye on recent developments – AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton recently stepped down from Google and publicly spoke of his concerns around artificial intelligence – Google was also keen to stress how it was taking its responsibilities seriously. Among its plans are helping to combat misinformation through watermarking and metadata in generative AI models, adding context to images in search such as where they have been used before, and working on tools to detect synthetic audio.
Will it be enough to stop the most dire predictions about AI coming to pass? That is a question that will remain unanswered for some time. But if past experience is anything to go by, an arms race on AI is not something that is likely to benefit society in the long run.
