Google's biggest annual developers event, Google I/O, kicked off on 14th May 2024. This year's event will be broadcast live in front of a small audience and is open to everyone online. Google CEO Sundar Pichai delivered the keynote address for the event. During his keynote, he introduced a number of upgrades, including the release of new Gemini and Gemma models, the latest AI features for Android, a new AI voice assistant, and a text-to-video generator.

"We are in the early days of the AI platform shift. We see so much opportunity ahead—for creators, developers, startups, and everyone. Helping to drive those opportunities is what our Gemini era is all about. So let's get started," said the CEO while delivering the keynote address.

The Gemini Era

Google's Gemini era began a year ago when they first shared their plans for Gemini, a frontier model built to be natively multimodal from the beginning that could reason across text, images, video, code, and more. According to Pichai, it marked a milestone in turning any input into any output—an "I/O" for a new generation.

The initial Gemini models demonstrated state-of-the-art performance. Since the launch of Gemini, they have introduced the Gemini 1.5 Pro, delivering a significant breakthrough in a long-term context. The CEO stated that more than 1.5 million developers use Gemini models today.

AI upgrades

The Gemini brought exciting transformations across Google products. In Google search, users have been leveraging it to ask new types of questions that are longer and more complex. There were searches with photos and getting back the best the web has to offer. After testing this experience outside of the labs, the Google CEO has confirmed that they will be launching a fully revamped experience, AI Overviews. 

Google is providing a Gemini AI-powered upgrade to Google Photos, calling it "Ask Photos." It will allow users to recall a specific picture based on a single prompt. The new feature takes advantage of Gemini's multimodal abilities to understand the context and subject of a picture and furnish the image requested by the user. 

Furthermore, Google Android users can also expect an upgrade as they plan to add AI capabilities using Gemini. Circle to search, the popular AI feature seen on Pixel, can aid students in completing their homework by providing them with step-by-step instructions to solve a range of physics and math problems.

Furthermore, Google is also giving Gemini a significant boost by allowing the AI assistant to appear above different apps on the screen. The new feature will enable users to use Gemini for tasks on their screens. 

Approaches to Responsible AI

Sunder Pichai also spoke about the company's plans with Responsible AI. "We're developing a cutting-edge technique we call AI-assisted red teaming that draws on Google DeepMind's gaming breakthroughs like AlphaGo to improve our models. Plus, we've expanded SynthID, our watermarking tool that makes AI-generated content easier to identify, to two new modalities: text and video", he said while delivering the keynote address. 

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