Google AI

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” That sentiment, along with derivatives like “people don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” makes predicting the future of technology difficult as it takes one innovation to completely shift the paradigm. It’s especially the case for the coming wave of AI features for new and existing Google apps.

In announcing layoffs, Sundar Pichai said Google is “getting ready to share some entirely new experiences for users, developers and businesses.” One report reveals what those Google AI-backed products are, and it includes a “wallpaper maker for the Pixel smartphone.”

ChatGPT’s ability to respond to questions in a conversational and direct manner has led some to proclaim that AI chat will kill the traditional search engine. Google is seriously responding to this, and – from what it’s already shown off – should be more than able to compete. The question is the user experience.

Google is at a “code red” and seriously responding to ChatGPT by reassigning various departments “to help develop and release new A.I. prototypes and products.”

As part of December’s Pixel Feature Drop, Google’s excellent Recorder app gained Speaker Labels that can identify multiple people. As with previous editions, the team behind it is out with an explanation of how the feature came to be.

For the past year or so, generative AI has been all the rage within the tech community. ChatGPT from startup OpenAI has received a lot of attention for how it can respond to questions, though there are critical failings in terms of accuracy. Google executives internally addressed ChatGPT recently and touched on what the company is doing in the space.

While Apple Silicon-powered Macs can run most iOS apps, the vast majority of developers have opted out. Google did that in late 2020, though it recently made its AI Test Kitchen iPhone/iPad app available on the Mac App Store.

Google announced AI Test Kitchen as a way to let people “learn about, experience, and give feedback on emerging AI technology.” First announced at I/O 2022 in May and rolled out in August, AI Test Kitchen “Season 2” was previewed today with a focus on text-to-image generators.

At I/O 2022 in May, Google announced the AI Test Kitchen mobile app as a means to let the public “learn about, experience, and give feedback on emerging AI technology.” You can now “Register your interest” for it to experience LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications).

Earlier this year, Google Research presented its work on RawNeRF with “NeRF in the Dark: High Dynamic Range View Synthesis from Noisy Raw Images” at the CVPR (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition) 2022 conference.

“Look and Talk” for the Nest Hub Max launched at I/O 2022, and Google has now detailed how exactly the camera-based, “Hey Google” replacement works. 

In addition to Imagen, Google has another text-to-image generator called Parti that also strives for photorealism but by using a different family of generative models. 

Over the weekend, a Google engineer on its Responsible AI team made the claim that the company’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) conversation technology is “sentient.” Experts in the field, as well as Google, disagree with that assessment.

In recent weeks, the DALL-E 2 AI image generator has been making the waves on Twitter. Google this evening publicized its own version called “Imagen,” and it pairs a deep level of language understanding with an “unprecedented degree of photorealism.”

Project Relate is a Google research effort to “help people with speech impairments communicate more easily with others and interact with the Google Assistant.” It’s actively looking for public English-speaking testers from four countries.

Google Research today announced a next-generation AI architecture called “Pathways.” This “new way of thinking about AI” is meant to address current “weaknesses of existing systems.”

The human brain is one of the most complex structures in existence. Google, in collaboration with Harvard University, today released a browsable 1.4-petabyte reconstruction of a very small part of the human cortex.

Trees play an important role in lowering street-level temperatures, especially in cities with heat islands that have a host of environmental issues. To help prioritize and make planting more efficient, Google has released the Tree Canopy Lab.

The ability to hum a song to Google was the breakout hit of last month’s Search keynote. In a blog post today, Google explains how the machine learning that powers Hum to Search works.