Google kicked off its annual developer conference I/O on Wednesday, unveiling two new Pixel smartphones and a revamped Pixel tablet intended to be a smart home hub. Aside from the hardware announcements, there was A LOT of AI talk in the opening keynote – it is 2023 after all. According to CNET, the term “AI” was mentioned more than 140 times during the roughly two-hour presentation, as Google didn’t shy away from letting the world know where it’s current focus was.
After having reportedly been caught on the wrong foot by the release of ChatGPT to the public, Google’s leadership had issued a “Code Red” in response to the chatbot’s rapid rise in popularity late last year, as it saw its core search business under threat. The fact that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is working closely with Microsoft, one of Google’s main rivals in the search business, didn’t make things better for Google, and sure enough, Microsoft keeps bringing AI-powered features to its search engine Bing.
On Wednesday, Google unveiled its next generation AI system PaLM 2, a “state-of-the-art language model”, which is “good at math, coding, reasoning, multilingual translation and natural language generation,” according to Zoubin Ghahramani, vice president at Google Deepmind. PaLM powers more than 25 products announced at I/O, including Bard, Google’s ChatGPT competitor, which will be rolled out to more than 180 countries after the trial period had been limited to the United States and the United Kingdom. Google also did its best to counter the idea that it had somehow fallen behind on AI, emphasizing its pioneering role in the industry over the past decade.
Ever since the launch of ChatGPT, AI has been making huge waves and the public can now witness firsthand how rapidly the technology is evolving. Tech companies such as Google’s parent Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta have fully embraced the AI trend, talking up the capabilities and use cases of AI at every occasion. Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple collectively mentioned the term “AI” almost 200 times in their latest earnings calls, up sharply from less than 40 mentions a year ago. As the following chart illustrates, Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft are much more involved in the AI craze than Amazon and Apple, which is understandable considering the different business models.
