ChatGPT has the search giant scared, so it’s doubling down on its own AI products
OpenAI’s latest project, ChatGPT, has taken the internet by storm. It’s a chatbot that’s capable of answering complex questions with ease and confidence (sadly, often enough not too accurately), and its potentially disruptive qualities have Google scared. After all, why wade through pages of Google Search results when you could just ask a chatbot for a quick answer to a question? According to a report, Google is doubling down on its own AI efforts to combat rising competitors like OpenAI, and could introduce a whole plethora of them during its Google I/O 2023 developer conference in May.
Google has already declared an internal “code red” to come up with a strategy to position itself against ChatGPT and similar AI products. It seems that the company is now preparing to accelerate many of its efforts, with The New York Times reporting that Google plans to introduce a number of projects to the public soon. According to the publication, the company plans to release as many as 20 products in this area this year, and it will demonstrate a chatbot-powered version of its search engine.
Among the projects the company could show off during Google I/O 2023 is an image generation studio that “creates and edits images” as well as a third iteration of the company’s AI Test Kitchen, the app it uses to test upcoming AI capabilities. The publication uncovered further projects that may or may not be presented at I/O 2023, and it lists a few of them:
- “Shopping Try-on:” A YouTube feature that uses green screen-like technology to help you try on clothes without leaving your house;
- “Maya:” a tool that can visualize shoes in 3D;
- A video summarization tool that generates another, shorter video;
- A wallpaper creation tool for Google Pixel phones;
- A tool created for other companies to help them build their own AI applications.
The company reportedly also has a tool for developers in mind that will become part of Android Studio. It is called Colab + Android Studio, and it will help developers fix their code. Supposedly, it will even write code on its own when prompted. PaLM-Coder 2 is reportedly another AI project that goes in the same direction, completing and generating code for users.
Compared to OpenAI’s products, Google’s AI projects are said to be worse at avoiding hateful, racist, sexual, and toxic content, which could throw a wrench in Google’s plans. If the company releases the products too soon, it could face public backlash just like Microsoft with its Tay chatbot that quickly turned into a hate-spewing, racist service thanks to the collaborative effort of humanity. On the other hand, Google made headlines last year with a now-fired employee claiming that its LaMDA 2 AI has gained sentience, so its AI efforts can’t be all that bad.
If Google is able to overcome these hurdles, Google I/O 2023 might turn out to be more interesting than any developer conference of the last few years, which were mostly focused on more tangible product updates to Android, ChromeOS, and more existing Google products.
