The Google I/O conference is an annual event where the tech giant showcases its latest developments, products, and technologies. In 2023, the event was held in Mountain View, California, and it brought together developers, engineers, and technology enthusiasts from around the world. The conference featured a series of keynote speeches, product demos, and panel discussions.
At the conference, Google announced several updates and improvements to its AI and machine learning platforms. Here are some of the key takeaways from the Google I/O 2023 conference.
Improving Search with Generative AI
One of the biggest announcements that was released at the conference related to improving Search with generative AI. Google Search will start looking very different in the future, an AI-powered snapshot of key information with links to find out more information will be displayed at the top. This is designed to help you understand a topic quicker, uncover new insights and viewpoints, and get things done more easily.
An example from Google:
“Let’s take a question like “what’s better for a family with kids under 3 and a dog, bryce canyon or arches.” Normally, you might break this one question down into smaller ones, sort through the vast information available, and start to piece things together yourself. With generative AI, Search can do some of that heavy lifting for you.”
“Below this snapshot, you’ll see suggested next steps, including the ability to ask follow-up questions, like “How long to spend at Bryce Canyon with kids?” When you tap on these, it takes you to a new conversational mode, where you can ask Google more about the topic you’re exploring.”
As you search, context from question to question will be carried over, helping you continue your exploration more naturally.
Helping You Shop with Generative AI
Another huge update from generative AI in Search is how products appear, with the goal to help you understand the full picture when making purchase decisions.
When searching for a product, you will now see a snapshot of noteworthy factors to consider alongside the products. This will include product descriptions, product images, reviews, and prices. This new shopping experience is built on Google’s Shopping Graph which has more than 35 billion product listings, making it the world’s most comprehensive dataset of constantly-changing products, brands, sellers, stock, and reviews.
New Immersive View for Routes in Maps
Last year Google introduced Immersive View which uses AI to create an accurate representation of a place, so you can experience it before you visit. This will include the ability to check air quality, traffic, and weather, as well as how they might change over your journey. They are expanding this technology so you will be able to see your whole trip in advance with ‘Immersive View for routes’ which will be available for walking, cycling, and driving.
They will begin the rollout over the summer and will have launched in 15 cities by the end of 2023, including London, San Francisco, New York, and Tokyo.
Introducing PaLM 2
Google is working towards making AI more helpful for everyone, and that relies on them continuously advancing its foundation models.
They have announced the launch of PaLM 2 which is Google’s next generation language model. It’s a state-of-the-art language model with improved multilingual, reasoning, and coding capabilities. Google explains how this works:
“Multilinguality: PaLM 2 is more heavily trained on multilingual text, spanning more than 100 languages. This has significantly improved its ability to understand, generate and translate nuanced text — including idioms, poems and riddles — across a wide variety of languages, a hard problem to solve. PaLM 2 also passes advanced language proficiency exams at the “mastery” level.
Reasoning: PaLM 2’s wide-ranging dataset includes scientific papers and web pages that contain mathematical expressions. As a result, it demonstrates improved capabilities in logic, common sense reasoning, and mathematics.
Coding: PaLM 2 was pre-trained on a large quantity of publicly available source code datasets. This means that it excels at popular programming languages like Python and JavaScript, but can also generate specialized code in languages like Prolog, Fortran and Verilog.”
Their team are dedicated to releasing the most helpful and powerful AI tools today, and PaLM 2 shows us the impact of highly capable models of various sizes and speeds.
Additional Updates
- Google is giving users more control of their data by informing users in permission requests when an app shares their information with third parties for advertising purposes.
- Duet AI for Google Cloud was announced which is a new generative AI-powered collaborator that will server as an expert programmer.
- Users can now sign up in AI Test Kitchen to test MusicLM which is a model capable of generating music from text descriptions.
- Google has entered the foldable smartphone market with the launch of its latest device, the Pixel Fold.
- Bard is now available in more than 180 markets.
If you want to learn more about the keynotes from Google I/O 2023, you can watch the recap videos.
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