Google showed off a slew of new AI products on Tuesday, leveraging its massive base of billions of users to boost its latest innovations and stay ahead in the tech industry’s high-stakes battle for artificial intelligence dominance.
Touting a “relentless” pace of AI innovation, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, unveiled many of the new products at the company’s I/O annual developer conference in Mountain View, Calif. Among the biggest updates, Google is rolling out its “AI mode”—a ChatGPT-like experience in Search that includes a new shopping experience and in-chat checkout. There are also improvements to its most sophisticated Gemini models; new AI capabilities in Gmail and Meet; new video and audio options; a funky AI-powered 3D communication platform called Google Beam; and a new Google AI Ultra subscription tier for a whopping $249.99/month.
Google is in a tight race with Facebook-parent company Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI, spending billions to develop new AI models and build the infrastructure to power AI services.
As a whole, the new releases show Google continuing what Google did at last year’s I/O: flexing its vast consumer distribution across a deep and broad mix of products with billions of users, as well as its research muscle with Google DeepMind. It’s a show of force that highlights Google’s key advantage: while OpenAI may lead in model innovation, it still lacks the consumer reach, product integration, and real-world distribution that Google commands.
In the company’s press materials, Google touted its latest AI moves as “taking our cutting-edge research to reality.” And in an advance press call, Pichai said “we are now entering a new phase of the AI platform shift, where decades of research are now becoming reality for people, businesses and communities all over the world.”
Consumers, of course, don’t care about a “platform shift” taking place just two years after Google launched its first AI chatbot, Bard, to compete with the soaring ChatGPT. What they will likely notice in their daily lives is less about the latest model, and more the AI products and features integrated across Google apps that, according to Pichai, users are adapting to more quickly than ever.
For example, last year’s big research prototype at I/O was Project Astra, an AI assistant that can see things in the real world in real-time–helping a person find their missing glasses, identify items, review code, and more. Today, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis announced that the company has integrated Project Astra capabilities into Gemini Live’s screen sharing option, into Search, and has plans to bring the “eyes” of Project Astra into AR glasses.
Shopping is another good example of how Google’s AI is advancing its way into shifting user habits. As AI in-chat shopping picks up speed, the company announced a new “AI mode” experience that will allow consumers to find products based on complex queries like “a cute travel bag suitable for a trip to Portland, Oregon in May.” Another feature would let users upload a picture of themselves and see how different dresses would look on them, while a checkout option would provide price-tracking and single-click checkout within a chat.
Google’s decades-long search dominance is an advantage here: After all, Google has its product graph–a massive proprietary map of products, brands, features, categories, reviews, prices, availability, and relationships between items—that it can build on.
In the advance call with the press, Vidhya Srinivasan, VP and general manager of ads and commerce at Google, said that the information – price, color, availability – is fresh and updated every hour. “That means users get information they can trust and information that is accurate.”
OpenAI’s ChatGPT has become a default AI entry point for millions, but the vast array of Google’s product announcements shows how the sheer scale of all things Google can give people a place to figure out how AI works for them. The ultimate vision, for which Google believes it has all the necessary pieces, is a personalized, proactive AI assistant that “knows” you, but which you can control across the range of apps you use every day.
Answering a question about what the biggest AI breakthrough is this year for consumers, Pichai said the magic in Google’s new features is that it’s getting to the point that people don’t know or care whether something is AI–just that it works in a natural, intuitive way.
“People just intuitively adapt to the power of what’s possible,” he said. “They don’t necessarily process it as AI or not.”
