Google: The Empire Nudges Back

Against OpenAI/Microsoft’s New Hopes.

Google, ‘the Empire Nudges Back’. 

Of course, OpenAI and Microsoft, the AI ‘Rebels’ in our tale, offering “A New Hope”, likely noticed. 

At this week’s Google’s 2023 I/O, AI was a laser focus across the company’s product lines and future products & services. 

As CNET noted (link below), CEO Sundar Pichai “and other presenters mentioned AI roughly 143 times over the two-hour presentation, for about 1.153 AI mentions per minute.”

And the words and accompanying presentations, had impact. Investors and Wall Street liked the narrative, and the stock was up over 5% post the keynotes. Separately, Wall Street analysts reported seeing no discernible impact on Google Search and its 93% share vs Bing at less than 3%, and despite ChatGPT’s notoriety. 

As the WSJ noted (link below),

“Google never promised to move fast and break things. Still, the last three months have been long ones for in­vestors wait­ing for the in­ter­net com­pany to find its feet on ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence. 

That wait seemed over fol­low­ing the kick­off of the Google I/O de­vel­op­ers con­fer­ence on Wednes­day. In a key­note ad­dress that lasted more than two hours, Google an­nounced a swath of new prod­ucts and tools fea­tur­ing the type of gen­er­a­tive AI made pop­u­lar via the launch of Chat­GPT late last year. 

The tech­nology is now be­ing in­te­grated into Google’s core search busi­ness as well as its An­droid mo­bile op­er­at­ing sys­tem and its bur­geon­ing cloud com­put­ing ser­vice. Not all of the lat­est of­fer­ings are com­ing im­me­diately. Some will at first roll out slowly through the ex­per­i­men­tal pro­gram called Search Labs. “

Overall, they’re not moving as fast as they could with public urgency given the almost daily drumbeats of progress by OpenAI and Microsoft, but they’re responding, even though it may be at a somewhat slower and more methodical pace. Impressive in the Keynote were the numbers of their properties that will soon touch billions of customers with LLM AI and Generative AI under the hood. 

As Sundar noted in his keynote, 

“Today, we have 15 products that each serve more than half a billion people and businesses. And six of those products serve over 2 billion users each. This gives us so many opportunities to deliver on our mission — to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Microsoft of course does not have similar scale at the consumer application level. 

Of note in particular were Google’s plans for next generation LLM AI PaLM 2 and Gemini. Again, Sundar highlighted:

“PaLM 2 builds on our fundamental research and our latest infrastructure. It’s highly capable at a wide range of tasks and easy to deploy. We are announcing more than 25 products and features powered by PaLM 2 today.

PaLM 2 models deliver excellent foundational capabilities across a wide range of sizes. We’ve affectionately named them Gecko, Otter, Bison, and Unicorn. Gecko is so lightweight that it can work on mobile devices: fast enough for great interactive applications on-device, even when offline. PaLM 2 models are stronger in logic and reasoning thanks to broad training on scientific and mathematical topics. It’s also trained on multilingual text — spanning more than 100 languages — so it understands and generates nuanced results.”

He didn’t stop there, underlining their timely AI reorganization:

“We recently brought these two teams together into a single unit, Google DeepMind. Using the computational resources of Google, they’re focused on building more capable systems, safely and responsibly.

This includes our next-generation foundation model, Gemini, which is still in training. Gemini was created from the ground up to be multimodal, highly efficient at tool and API integrations and built to enable future innovations, like memory and planning. While still early, we’re already seeing impressive multimodal capabilities not seen in prior models.

Once fine-tuned and rigorously tested for safety, Gemini will be available at various sizes and capabilities, just like PaLM 2.”

Lots more was discussed in terms of specific products and services being enhanced with AI, but the above were some key highlights that will drive the field over the next 12 to 24 months. Stay tuned.