That wasn’t Google I/O ----- it was Google AI

 If you thought generative AI was a big deal last year, wait until you see what it looks like in products that are already being used by billions.

Things got weird right from the jump at Google I/O yesterday when a duck hit the stage.

The day began with a musical performance described as "a generative AI experiment with Dan Deacon and Google's AI tools MusicLM, Phenaki and Bard". It was not clear exactly how much of it was made by machine and how much by people. There was a long, lyrically rambling treatise on meeting a lipped duck. Deacon informed the audience that we were all in a band called Chiptune and launched into a song with various chiptune riffs layered on top of each other. Later he had a song about oat milk? I believe the lyrics were created entirely by AI. Someone in a duck suit with lipstick came out and danced on stage. It was all very confusing.

Everything about life in the age of artificial intelligence is again a bit confusing and weird. And this was undoubtedly an AI show. It was Google I/O as Google AI. So much so that on Twitter, in the Internet's comments section, one person after another used #GoogleIO to complain about all the AI ​​talk and urge Google to get on with it and get to phones. (There was the eagerly awaited new phone, the Pixel Fold. It folds.)

But when Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who once led the company's Android efforts, took the stage, he made it clear what he wanted to talk about. It wasn't a new phone - it was AI. He started by going straight for the way AI is in everything the company does now. With generative AI, he said, “We're redesigning all of our core products, including Search.

I don't think that's quite right.

At Google in 2023, it seems pretty clear that the core product is now AI itself. Or at least it is the backbone of this product, a key ingredient that manifests itself in various forms. As my colleague Melissa Heikkilä put it in her report on the company's efforts: Google is throwing generative AI into everything.

The company did this in one demo after another, all morning long. A Gmail demo showed how generative AI can craft a sophisticated airline email to help you get a refund. The new Magic Editor in Google Photos not only removes unwanted elements, but also repositions people and objects in photos, makes the sky brighter and bluer, and then adjusts the lighting in the photo to make everything look natural.

In Docs, AI creates a complete job description from just a few words. Generates tables. It helps you plan your vacation in Search, adjust the tone of your text messages to be more professional (or more pleasant), give you an "immersive view" in Maps, summarize your emails, write computer code, seamlessly translate lip-sync videos. It's so deeply integrated not just into the Android operating system, but into the hardware itself that Google is now making "the only phone with artificial intelligence at its core," as Google's Rick Osterloh said when describing the G2 chip. Yuck.

Google I/O is a highly, highly scripted event. For months, the company has faced criticism that its AI efforts are being surpassed by the likes of ChatGPT OpenAI or Microsoft Bing. Alarm bells were also ringing inside. Today it felt like a long overdue response. All in all, the demos felt like a kind of flex — a way to show what the company has under the hood and how it can deploy the technology in its existing, massively popular products (Pichai noted that the company has five different products with more than 2 billion users). .

And yet, at the same time, he's clearly trying to fall in line and show off what he can do, but in ways that, you know, won't scare anyone.

Three years ago, the company ousted Timnit Gebra, co-head of its AI ethics team, essentially over a paper that raised concerns about the dangers of large language models. Gebru's concerns have since become mainstream. Her departure and its aftermath marked a turning point in the conversation about the dangers of uncontrolled AI. One would hope that Google would learn from this; from her.

And then, just last week, Geoffrey Hinton announced he was leaving Google, in large part to sound the alarm about the dire consequences of rapid advances in AI that he fears could soon allow it to surpass human intelligence. intelligence. (Or, as Hinton put it, "it is quite conceivable that humanity is only a transitional stage in the evolution of intelligence".)

And so yesterday's I/O was a far cry from 2018's event, when the company gleefully showed off Duplex and demonstrated how Google Assistant can make automated calls to small businesses without letting the people on those calls know they're talking to AI. . It was an incredible demo. And one that deeply unsettled a great many people.

We heard time and time again at this year's I/O about accountability. James Manyika, who leads the company's technology and society program, began by talking about the wonders that artificial intelligence has been able to perform, particularly in the area of ​​protein folding, but quickly moved on to the ways in which society thinks about disinformation, noting how images generated by watermarking and alluding to on the railing to prevent their misuse.

It was shown how Google could deploy image provenance to counter misinformation, effectively debunking image searches by showing the first indexing (in an on-stage example, a fake photo to show the moon landing was a hoax). It was a bit of grounding between all the awe and wonder, operating at scale.

And then… to the phones. The new Google Pixel Fold received the biggest applause of the day. People like gadgets.

The phone can fold, but for me it was one of the least impressive things of the day. And I kept going back in my head to one of the first examples we saw: a photo of a woman standing in front of some hills and a waterfall.

The Magic Editor erased her backpack strap. Cold! And it also made the cloudy sky look much bluer. To support this, in another example—this time of a child sitting on a bench with balloons—Magic Editor once again brightened the day and then adjusted all the lighting in the photos to make the sunlight look more natural. More real than real.

How far do we want to go here? What is the ultimate goal we are moving towards? Finally, shall we skip the holidays altogether and create some nice, pretty pictures? Can we replace our memories with sunnier, more idealized versions of the past? Are we making reality better? Is everything more beautiful? Is everything better? Is it all very, very cool? Or something else? Something we haven't realized yet?