The Google I/O Conference yesterday was a bit strange right away, when a duck walked on stage.
The day started with a performance that was described as "a generative AI experiment featuring Dan Deacon, Google's MusicLM and Phenaki AI tools, and Bard AI." It was not clear how much of the music was created by machine and how much human. A long, lyrically rambling discourse was written about meeting a duck that had lips. Deacon told the audience we were in a group called Chiptune, and then launched into a song that had chiptune riffs on top of one another. He then had a song on oatmilk? I think the lyrics were generated by AI. Someone in a ducksuit with lipstick danced on the stage. The whole thing was very confusing.
Then again, life in the AI age is confusing and bizarre. This was the AI show, without a doubt. Google I/O was Google AI. It was so bad that people used #GoogleIO on Twitter to express their displeasure at all the AI talk and urged Google to hurry up and release the phones. There was a new phone that had been eagerly anticipated, the Pixel Fold. The phone folds.
Sundar Pichai – the former head of Google's Android efforts – made it very clear when he stepped up to speak on stage. The topic wasn't the new phone, but AI. He began by pointing out how AI is a part of everything that the company does. He said that with generative AI "we are reimagining our core products including Search."
I don't believe that's right.
In 2023, Google's core product will be . Or, at least, it is the core of this product. It manifests in many different ways. Google, as my colleague Melissa Heikkila said in her report about the company's initiatives: Google throws generative AI at anything.
This was the company's message in demo after demo all morning. Gmail demonstrated how AI could create a complex email to send to an airline in order to get you a refund. Google Photos' new Magic Editor will not only remove unwanted objects, but also reposition them in your photos. It can also brighten and change the color of the sky.
Docs' AI can create a complete job description with just a few simple words. It can create spreadsheets. It can help you plan your vacation with Search, change the tone of your texts to make them more professional (or personable), summarize your emails, write computer codes, and seamlessly translate lip-sync video. Google has integrated AI so deeply into the Android OS and hardware that it is now the "only phone with AI as its core," according to Rick Osterloh, who described the G2 chip. Phew.
Google I/O has a very, very scripted feel to it. Since months, the company has been criticized for its slow AI progress compared to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing. Alarms were also ringing within the company. Today was a well-planned response to this. The demos were a kind flex, a way for the company to demonstrate what it has in the back and how they can use that technology across its massively popular, existing products. (Pichai stated that the company had five products, each with over 2 billion users.
It is trying to show off its capabilities, but not in a way that will, you know, scare everyone.
Timnit Gebru was fired by the company three years ago for a paper which raised serious concerns regarding the dangers of big language models. Gebru's worries have become mainstream. Her departure and the repercussions marked a pivotal moment in the discussion about the dangers associated with unchecked AI. Google should have learned something from this.
Geoffrey Hinton, who announced his resignation from Google last week, did so in part to be able to raise the alarm about the dangers of AI's rapid advances, which he believes could lead to it surpassing human intelligence in the near future. Hinton said that it's "quite possible" that humans are just a temporary phase of the evolution in intelligence.
I/O was very different yesterday from what it was in 2018. Then, the company demonstrated Duplex with great glee, showing how Google Assistant can make automated calls to businesses, without ever telling the callers that they were talking to an AI. This was a fantastic demo. It was a demo that left many people feeling deeply uncomfortable.
We heard responsibility mentioned repeatedly at the I/O conference this year. James Manyika, the leader of the company's Technology and Society program, began by talking about AI and its wonders, especially in the area of protein folding. He then quickly moved on to how the company views misinformation. James noted that it would watermark images and referred to guardrails for preventing their misuse.
A demo was given on how Google could use image provenance as a tool to combat misinformation. It was shown that a fake photograph purporting to prove the hoax of the moon landing had been indexed the first time. The demonstration was an attempt to bring some sanity into the chaos of all this awe, wonder and scale.
Then… the phones. The Google Pixel Fold received the most applause of the day. People like gadgets.
It may be that the phone folds, but it was one of the least interesting things I saw in a day. In my mind, I kept going back to the first example we saw: A photo of a lady standing in front of hills and a water fall.
Magic Editor removed her backpack strap. Cool! It also made the clouds look more blue. Magic Editor reinforced this by making the day brighter in a second example, with a child on a bench and holding balloons. It then adjusted the lighting of the photos to make the sunlight look more natural. More real than ever.
How far would you like to go? What is our ultimate goal? Do we skip the vacation and just take some beautiful pictures instead? Can we replace our memories with a more idyllic, sunnier version of the past? Do we make reality better? Is the world more beautiful? Is it better? Is everything better? Is it something else? What have we not realized?
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By: Mat Honan
Title: That wasn’t Google I/O — it was Google AI
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/05/11/1072885/google-io-google-ai/
Published Date: Thu, 11 May 2023 17:47:55 +0000
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