Google at I/O 2023: We’ve been doing AI since before it was cool

Enlarge / Google CEO Sundar Pichai explains some of the company’s many new AI models. (credit: Google)

That Google I/O show sure was something, wasn’t it? It was a rip-roaring two hours of nonstop AI talk without a break. Bard, Palm, Duet, Unicorn, Gecko, Gemini, Tailwind, Oter—there were so many cryptic AI code names thrown around it was hard to keep track of what Google was talking about. A glossary really would have helped. The highlight was, of course, the hardware, but even that was talked about as an AI delivery system.

Google is in the midst of a total panic over the rise of OpenAI and its flagship product, ChatGPT, which has excited Wall Street and has the potential to steal some queries people would normally type into Google.com. It’s an embarrassing situation for Google, especially for its CEO Sundar Pichai, who has been pitching an “AI first” mantra for about seven years now and doesn’t have much to show for it. Google has been trying to get consumers excited about AI for years, but people only seemed to start caring once someone other than Google took a swing at it.

Even more embarrassing is that the rise of ChatGPT was built on Google’s technology. The “T” in “ChatGPT” stands for “transformer,” a neural network technique Google invented in 2017 and never commercialized. OpenAI took Google’s public research, built a product around it, and now uses that product to threaten Google.