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Google I/O 2024, Mountain View wants Gemini everywhere

2 months ago babelfish

Google I/O 2024, Mountain View wants Gemini everywhere

The response to OpenAI's commercial innovations came from the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View: the protagonist of Google I/O 2024 was in fact artificial intelligence. And with Project Astra the challenge to Gpt-4o, the latest addition to ChatGpt, begins

The advance of artificial intelligence could revolutionize the geography of the Web. It may seem like a science fiction assertion, but even a giant like Google, the nerve center of the Internet as we know it today, seems to be aware of it. On Monday 13 May OpenAI (an emerging software house but heavily funded by Microsoft) lifted the veil on its Gpt-4o , not even 24 hours after Mountain View's response arrived with Google I/O 2024.

GOOGLE I/O 2024: AI HAS THE WORD

From the stage of the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, the annual conference aimed at developers but traditionally open to the general public allowed the upper echelons of Google to reel off their list of products and services that all or almost all have to do with Gemini .

“We have been investing in artificial intelligence for more than ten years. We are in the middle of the Gemini era, but we are only at the beginning", the phrase with which CEO Sundar Pichai opened the proceedings but above all wanted to put his hat on the issue of AI, a competition in which Microsoft with its investments in OpenAI at the moment it seems to excel. So here is “Google expands AI in search”.

MORE THAN GOOGLE I/O 2024, GOOGLE IA 2024

Most commentators focused on Gemini's hyper-presenteeism, now forcefully introduced into every feature that Mountain View makes available to users and developers. Start Magazine instead decided to focus on the fierce dispute between Google and OpenAI, a dispute well represented by another product.

This is why this report of the Google I/O 2024 event begins with Project Astra, a real response to OpenAI's Gpt-4o, presented only a few hours earlier by the rival software house. Astra is configured as a multimodal digital assistant that processes text, voice and images in real time.

From the videos shown by US Big Tech it seems that Mountain View intends to dust off niche peripherals such as Google Glass which would allow Astra to see the surrounding world, commenting on what the user frames.

GEMINI IN ALL SAUCES

The objective is also to make people forget as soon as possible the recent stumble with the images , and so here comes a coup de theatre: Gemini Pro 1.5 opens up to 35 languages, including Italian, in 150 countries for Gemini Advanced subscribers .

Then comes Gemini's little brother, called 1.5 Flash, which promises to be lighter and less expensive than Gemini 1.5 Pro, therefore more accessible to developers and especially to startuppers who will be able to exploit its features to populate their sites with content or communicate with users.

“Gemini 1.5 Flash excels at tasks like summaries, chat conversations, captioning images and videos, extracting data from long documents and tables, and much more,” explained Demis Hassabis , CEO of Google DeepMind. You will also find Gemini in Google Photos with the "Ask" function, through which the system will fish out the requested photo from the archive, saving you the time of sorting through them one by one.

And given that the terrain is mine, since it involves applying algorithms that devour data to a private sphere such as that of images and video memories, Google immediately wanted to prevent any criticism and reassure: "Your photos and videos are never used for advertising. And no one will examine your conversations,” underlined the hi-tech giant.

VEO CHALLENGES SORA

Still on the subject of AI, two other variations of smart algorithms are Veo and Imagen 3 through which Google renews its challenge to OpenAI's Sora . In fact, Veo allows you to create videos of over a minute based on textual prompts, with the promise that it will not stumble where artificial intelligences have proven most fallacious: the reproduction of physics. Imagen 3, improves Google's AI for creating images, always starting from written indications.

IS GOOGLE PERCHED IN MOUNTAIN VIEW?

In short, there are truly numerous "intelligent" innovations cooked up by Google. The constant sensation felt while attending the event, however, is that this year the main square of the Web is suddenly a little more peripheral and playing on defense.

It seems that Google has taken refuge in Mountain View: nothing new worthy of the name, just a long list of software that, in some way, replicates what has already been proposed or even just announced by its increasingly numerous and aggressive opponents. Will the battle of AI succeed in revolutionizing the Internet and its protagonists? Only the future – and artificial intelligence – can answer this question.

This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/google-i-o-2024-mountain-view-vuole-gemini-ovunque/ on Wed, 15 May 2024 09:07:06 +0000.