Google I/O 2023 live: AI reaches ‘inflection point’, CEO says, as Bard opens to all

We’ve barely started and it’s already all about artificial intelligence.

“As you may have heard, AI is having a very busy year,” Pichai says.

“Seven years into our journey as an AI-first company, we are at an exciting inflection point. We have an opportunity to make AI even more helpful for people, for businesses, for communities, for everyone.”

Generative AI is being integrated into Gmail and Maps and Photos.

For Gmail, the AI will compose entire emails for you with a single prompt. The example given is asking for a full refund from a flight being cancelled. Help Me Write builds on its Smart Reply and Smart Compose features.

It’s going to become a lot harder to tell what is real and what is not with Google’s new AI-enabled photo tech.

Magic Eraser, which first came to Pixel phones, will allow users to remove unwanted objects from images, while Magic Editor will allow people to add things that weren’t there in the first place.

Pichai follows this unveiling by saying Google is committed to rolling out AI responsibly. Maybe, but this tech could surely be easily misused.

Now on to Google’s latest large language model (LLM) PaLM 2. It’s apparently the first ever language model to perform at “expert level” on medical licensing exams.

It’s the first major collaboration between Google’s two main AI divisions: DeepMind and Brain.

“Looking back at the defining AI breakthroughs over the last decade, these teams have contributed to a significant number of them,” Pichai says.

“All this helps set the stage for the inflection point we are at today.”

Sundar Pichai is still going - he seems to have a lot more stamina than Tim Cook and other tech CEOs, who have usually passed off the keynote to some of the other executives by this point.

He once again brings up responsible AI, and how this going to impact its flagship Bard AI product.

Pichai has finally handed it over to one of his executives, Sissie Hsiao, who announces that new tools are coming to Bard.

“In the next few weeks, Bard will become more visual, both in its responses and your prompts,” she says.

This means you can “have some fun with your fur babies”, by adding AI-generated captions to pictures of your pets.

The waitlist for Google Bard has been removed. It’ll be available in 180 different countries and regions.

It’s also on track to support 40 languages soon (currently it only supports English).

Aparna Pappu is now on stage to tell us about AI and Workspace - which includes Google Drive, Gmail and Calendar.

“AI can act as a coach, a thought partner, a source of inspiration, as well as a productivity booster across all of the apps of Wokspace,” she says.

These include the Help Me Write feature in Gmail and Docs, which has been used to write essays, sales pitches and product plans since it soft launched to early testers in March.

Plenty of new tools have been added since then, such as a new organisation feature in Sheets that uses AI to create spreadsheets with a single text prompt.

Sundar Pichai is back on stage to introduce the next topic, Google’s founding product: search.

Cathy Edwards comes on to tell us how generative AI is going to be integrated into Google Search.

Its similar to Microsoft’s Bing search function, which allows users to ask questions in natural language.

“These new generative AI capabilities will make Search smarter and searching simpler,” Edwards says.

Two humans argue, “yes”, “no”, “yes”, “no”, before turning to AI to find out the answer to whether a hot dog is a sandwich or not.

No matter what Google’s newly-enabled generative AI search engine comes up with, it’s surely not as good as Sundar Pichai’s answer, who’s back on stage to give his thoughts.

“I think it’s more like a taco because the bread goes around it,” he says.