Google Serves a Multicourse AI Meal

The season of AI hype continues. Yesterday it was OpenAI. Today it was Google, which used its annual developer conference, Google I/O, to chronicle all of the ways it’s pushing the ball forward in artificial intelligence. Google is part of a $2 trillion–plus company, so it had a lot of ground to cover, which may explain why its event clocked in at about two hours, including an opening act, musician Marc Rebillet. At 26 minutes, yesterday’s event from OpenAI (last valued at $86 billion) was a mere hors d’oeuvre to Google’s 12-course meal. 

Google showed how it’s further integrating AI into search, enabling more complex forms of research and planning (for example, generating three days of vegetarian meal plans from a query). It introduced a new text-to-video tool called Veo and a multimodal AI assistant called Project Astra. There seems to be no existing Google product that won’t get a new AI injection, including Google Docs, Gmail and Chrome. My personal favorite might have been one of the simplest (and perhaps the creepiest): a scam-call detection tool for Android phones that warns you in real time when someone on the other end of the phone is about to fleece you.