Google launches AI at IO 2023, keeps temperature low

Even a company as powerful as Google, and even a technology with as much potential as AI, can’t control California’s increasingly weird weather.

So while CEO Sundar Pichai brought the world’s developers and media into an outdoor stadium for a two-hour presentation of Google’s new AI offerings, he wasn’t can blame the unseasonably cold fog that smothered Mountain View. Not even if he left his audience so cold that this distressed cry was heard in the bathroom line afterward: “I can’t feel my hands!”

But is the Google IO presentation itself a cold fish? A dull imitation of an overlong Apple event, despite major AI news on the Gmail, Docs and search fronts? We can put this charge at the door of the Googleplex on the road. This presentation, frankly, could have been a Gmail.

It wasn’t meant to be. Google had promised a showcase for all the creativity that its Bard AI service can unleash. The pre-show on the rainbow-framed Shoreline Amphitheater stage featured creature-filled AI-generated visuals behind a DJ that got the crowd going wild before calling it quits. a duck with giant lips(opens in a new tab)like something out of a Disney fever dream, in person.

Here was something Apple has never done, an act of warming up (literally, warming us up, in this case). Here was something Microsoft didn’t do in its launch of Bing powered by ChatGPT: not just show AI, but make it look like fun.

And to be fair to Pichai, who took the stage after the duck promising to “make AI useful for everyone,” he made a good decision to open with Bard’s Gmail integration. Normally it would be hard to make a sexy Gmail ad, but AI-written email replies (in draft form, ready for your edits) could be a killer app for Google.

GIMME.
Credit: Google

I’m sure I’m not the only reluctant email user. You’re not the only person with ADHD who struggles with the stress of an empty response window. In fact, AI-powered Gmail has so much potential that I wish the CEO had lingered longer. Pichai barely had time to show an example, in which Bard responded to a canceled flight alert with a refund request, available in both plain flavors and, according to an on-screen option, “elaborate “.

What exactly did “crafted” mean? There were some other intriguing examples of email responses, perhaps? We were left to discover on our own. Perhaps Google has learned its lesson from Bard’s first search event, where the famous AI got the answer wrong.

The problem is that this sort of thing is exactly why we as users are skeptical of AI and its “hallucinations”. This is precisely why we need to go deeper.

And Google rarely did. The word AI was woven into every segment of the two-hour event, so much so that even the coveted Pixel products seemed subservient (the Pixel itself, once just a smartphone, had now retroactively been “heading the way in AI hardware for years.” “) The Pixel tablet’s unveiling almost came out unscathed, until mention of its “cutting-edge AI” was thrown around. I tried a drinking game ” IA” with Google coffee and finally connected.

Now we welcome you to the Coachella Main Stage… Generative AI Wallpaper!
Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

To be fair, they weren’t all segments like the endless “generative AI wallpaper” demo. There was also a presentation on Google’s vision of “bold and responsible AI”, much needed when your product can be misused. It’s nice to see that the company includes reverse image search and digital watermarking of its own AI images. This is a much-needed bid to stem the tide of misinformation, such as the “fake moon landing” used in the segment.

Now, if Bard would just write to your conspiracy-loving uncle on Facebook for you, we’d be set.

But what brought these ads together, other than a desperate desire to capitalize on Google’s position on Wall Street with multiple mentions of the latest tech buzzword? If you look at the dizzying demos of Google Workspace with the Bard integration, you could almost see the brave new world that Google promised: a utopian future where we don’t need to write our own first drafts, or outline our own documents, or build our own spreadsheets A competent enough digital assistant can do this for us. (Maybe AI would be less scary if it meant “Artificial Internal”).

But the vision thing was barely tied. Google seemed to take a lot of inspiration from Apple’s keynotes, but the Tim Cook kind, not the original Steve Jobs. Jobs was so good at lulling us into his conceptual enthusiasm for what technology could do, he was said to have a “reality distortion field.” Perhaps Pichai could ask Bard to write his next paper in the style of Jobs. It would certainly be easier than predicting the weather.