Tech giant Google announced a raft of new artificial intelligence-enabled features at its annual Google I/O conference, with updated artificial intelligence technology set to appear on its main platform.
At the annual Google I/O conference in California on May 10, CEO Sundar Pichai delivered a keynote address on the most important update to the company's AI stack, among other announcements. Google shows its hand
The Pathways Language Model (PaLM) was released by Google last August. Since then, developers have used language learning models to release generative AI-related applications, such as the wildly popular chatbot.
Google updated its model with "PaLM 2," improving its inference, encoding, and multilingual capabilities as the model is trained on more complex and diverse topics. The PaLM 2 will come in a variety of sizes -- an iteration of the model capable of deploying on phones. Google said the new PaLM is the backbone of more than 25 applications and showcased two specialized models. Med-PaLM 2 for medical applications and Sec PaLM 2 for cybersecurity. Google's flagship search product is getting AI backup after rival Microsoft be at it to the punch by integrating OpenAI's ChatGPT into its Binsearch engine.
The feature, matter-of-factly called "Search Generation Experience" (SGE), will have a limited experimental release to opt-in US users for testing before Google considers a wider rollout. Based on a demo of the product, the tool appears to collate information from web pages and serve it up in a ChatGPT-like response in Google Search above the actual search results. It also provides information about searched products when users use the "Shop" option in Search. For example, in a demo provided by Google, when a user searches for electric bikes, the model makes suggestions about what to look for on a bike. Google's Bard gets a boost
Bard -- Google's answer to ChatGPT -- is one of the products receiving the PaLM 2 treatment, getting enhanced features and a wider launch. The conversational AI model launched about two months ago, but only in the US and UK; it's now rolled out to more than 180 countries, with more to come. Part of Bard's upgrades include improvements to its encoding capabilities and repertoire. Google is also improving its citations by highlighting where it gets certain code from bots. A generative image AI tool from graphics soft ware company Adobe will also soon be integrated into Bard, enabling it to generate images from prompts similar to similar popular tools.
Mail, documents, maps, and more get AI-powered
Many other Google products are also powered by PaLM 2, and Pichai conducted a series of demos showing off the new AI capabilities on Google Maps, Docs, Mail and Photos. A demo highlighted an AI version of Gmail's "Smart Compose" feature, which can automatically generate email responses using prompts. It can also be improved to make the text more formal, detailed or shorter, and seems to pull data from email threads to batch replies. A similar product, "Magic Compose," is coming to Google's Android phones , offering AI-generated responses that apparently help give messages "the desired vibe," such as "chill" or "Shakespeare." Even though PaLM 2 has just been released, Google is still working on an apparently more advanced large-scale language model called "Gemini" to replace it,or at least provide an alternative.
Gemini is still being trained, but Pichai said Google "has seen impressive multimodal capabilities not seen in previous models." Gemini, like PaLM 2, will be available in a variety of sizes and capabilities once it is "fine-tuned and rigorously tested for safety," he added.
