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Google is going all-in to win the AI arms race

Matt Levin May 11, 2023
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Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai delivers the keynote address at the Google I/O developers conference on May 10, 2023 in Mountain View, California. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Google is going all-in to win the AI arms race

Matt Levin May 11, 2023
Heard on:
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai delivers the keynote address at the Google I/O developers conference on May 10, 2023 in Mountain View, California. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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COPY

Google has unveiled a slew of new artificial intelligence products — AI to write your emails, AI to organize your spreadsheets and AI that can pass medical licensing exams.

All of this debuted this week at the company’s annual developer conference in Mountain View, California. Google’s announcements mark yet another escalation in big tech’s AI arms race.

Google used to be reluctant to deploy many of its AI tools, partly for fear of the technology’s potential to spread misinformation or cause other harm.

However, after ChatGPT debuted in November and Microsoft incorporated it in its Bing search engine, AI was the star of the show in Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s presentation this week.

“We are at an exciting inflection point … we have an opportunity to make AI even more helpful,” Pichai said.

Beyond ditching wait lists for its AI chatbot Bard, Google also is planning a feature for Android phones that lets AI rewrite your text messages.

Defiance ETFs CEO Sylvia Jablonski said big tech firms are figuring out how to monetize AI pretty quickly.

But, she said, “If the data is good, if its bad, if its biased, I don’t get the sense really that any of the competitors have figured it out quite yet.”

Yesterday Google also announced plans to incorporate watermarking into AI image-generation tools.

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