Google I/O 2024

Opinion: Google I/O’s announcements lost their impact to the AI arms race

Ben Schoon | May 14 2024 - 12:45 pm PT

Google I/O 2024, more than ever before, was literally all about AI. But even though the event had a bunch of impressive announcements, it felt a bit tedious. Why?

If you watched the Google I/O 2024 keynote today, you might not remember a lot of specific announcements. That’s because everything was all about the same topic – AI. Over the course of over two hours, the event saw big announcements that went quickly – like AI Overviews rolling out to all users in Search – and others that just felt out of place in Google’s biggest event of the year.

In years past, Google I/O was about more than one subject. The event usually kicked off with Sundar Pichai discussing Google’s advancements in AI and Search before moving on to consumer-facing products like Android, Chrome, Workspace, and more. Technically speaking, that also happened this year; it was just all about the same central theme – AI.

What were the big announcements?

Some standouts include “Ask Photos” in Google Photos, which can sift through your library to find useful information. Then there’s Gemini Live and Project Astra, multimodal AI experiences that produce impressively fast responses to voice and video input in real-time. There was also the ability for Android to scan calls on your device using AI and flag potential scams. There was also “Veo,” an impressive generative AI for video, and a useful side panel in Gmail, Docs, and more that uses Gemini 1.5 Pro to help you condense information.

Genuinely, a lot of it was rather exciting.

So why did the event as a whole feel boring?

In part, it’s because a whole lot of it was playing catch-up. Google has been in a constant game of cat and mouse when it comes to AI innovation, largely competing with OpenAI. Everyone’s chasing expanded context windows, new features, better performance, and so on. The day before Google I/O, OpenAI hosted an event where it revealed GPT-4o and new multimodal capabilities within ChatGPT. It’s a lot of the same stuff Google showed off here. By doing that, OpenAI definitely stole a bit of Google’s thunder, but not entirely.

Aside from the fact it wasn’t live, Google’s demos were more impressive than OpenAI’s. Watching the clip of Project Astra in action and hearing “do you remember where my glasses are” only for the AI to correctly say where it saw them moments earlier was amazing.

But the impact of that incredible demo was undercut by the 1.5 hours and literally 100 more mentions of AI that followed.

OpenAI’s event, compared to Google’s, was fast-paced and easy to digest. Ironically, those two are the main goals of Google’s various AI products, but I/O just didn’t deliver in the same way. It lacked the same impact. AI is not easy to explain, especially when you get into the technical details – for example, tokens are an incredibly important part of AI, as the number of tokens an AI can use equates to what the AI is capable of, but the average user doesn’t yet understand that. A big part of the problem of the keynote, I feel, was that too much time was spent on those technical details. Those would have been better served by dedicated sessions later on in the day, rather than the biggest spotlight Google gets for the entire year. And as a result, other key products for Google, including Android, didn’t get the attention they deserve.

Google I/O 2024’s keynote absolutely had some highs, but as it just kept going, the excitement was diluted.

And what made matters worse was that, after the first hour and all of the big reveals, Google circled back to a lot of what was already announced. That felt messy and confusing, and again undercut the impact Google was trying to make.

Top comment by tiggerboy0301

Liked by 16 people

I've yet to see how Google is planning on making Gemini available for Google users outsider the U.S. especially in the EU and the UK. I certainly pay for the hardware and the services, I should be getting an equal service.

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The entire keynote was just a two-hour reminder that “hey, we’re good at AI too!” Google doesn’t need to do that. It’s proven time and time again that it’s good at AI. The products need to speak for themselves and, to do that, they need room to breathe.

At Google’s scale, the timing of their arrival doesn’t feel nearly as important as the way in which they’re shown off. Google is good at AI, and doing things that literally no one else is capable of with things like Google Photos and Gmail integration. It’s those unique and impressive integrations that Google needs to be focusing on, not just trying to steal the spotlight from someone else.