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Google I/O 2024 Highlights: Advancing the Frontiers of AI Technology

Explore the major announcements from Google I/O 2024, including new AI models and innovative product features that promise to transform the tech landscape.

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Solan Sync
May 16, 2024

GOOGLE I/O 2024

There’s a lot to cover, but let’s start with the key themes:

Google is integrating AI into all of its ecosystem. In true Google fashion, many features are “coming later this year.” If they ship and perform like the demos, Google will gain a serious upper hand over OpenAI/Microsoft.

All of the AI features across Google products will be powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro, Google’s best model and one of the top models available. A new Gemini 1.5 Flash model has also been launched, which is faster and much cheaper.

Google has ambitious projects in the pipeline, including a real-time voice assistant called Astra, a long-form video generator called Veo, plans for end-to-end agents, virtual AI teammates, and more.

Integration into Products


The SGE (Search Generative Experience) is coming out of beta as “AI overviews” for everyone, starting with the US. AI overviews will also feature multi-step reasoning and the ability to search based on a video. Read more about Search updates here.

Ask Photos:


This new feature upgrades searching through photos from simple keywords like “flowers” to complex queries like “show me all the images of my son playing with our dog” and “what was the first place we visited on our Japan trip.”

Gmail:


The same search, reasoning, and Q&A capabilities across emails will come to Gmail. Gmail is also testing features via Labs, such as email summaries and suggested drafts as replies. The AI side panel in Docs, Sheets, and other workspace apps is coming to everyone with more features. Details on AI in Gmail and Workspace.

Android:


Gemini Nano will power on-device features like Circle to Search, Multimodal Talkback, and Scam detection.

Gemini Advanced:


Google’s paid chatbot is getting features like file uploads and data analysis (like code interpreter). These will be live soon, powered by Gemini 1.5 Pro. On the longer horizon, Gemini Live will compete with ChatGPT’s voice assistant revealed by OpenAI, and Gems will be Google’s version of GPTs.

Models

Gemini 1.5 Pro:


Revealed in February, it is now available to everyone via API, AI studio, Gemini Advanced, and all the product updates. Google claims improvements on a number of metrics, but no technical report is available yet.

Gemini 1.5 Flash:


A new model available in API and AI studio, it is faster and cheaper than Gemini 1.5 Pro. Its performance on select benchmarks places it in the Llama 3 70B and Claude Sonnet category, but with a price similar to Claude Haiku.

Multimodality

All models in the Gemini family are natively multimodal, capable of handling text, images, audio, or video as input and creating any form of output. Examples include Ask Photos and Audio outputs in Notebook LM.

The 1.5 series had a context window of 1M tokens (2M is in preview now), allowing for the inclusion of very long files in any media form.

OpenAI’s GPT-4o is their first such model. Previously, OpenAI used to stitch different models to achieve multimodality.

Google’s War Against OpenAI

Project Astra:


A general AI assistant that can talk to you in real-time, understanding the audio and video around you. Unlike the “Her” hype, Google isn’t focused on making it sound like ScarJo, but the functionality is similar. Jerry compiled a bunch of friends trying out Astra at I/O. Project Astra will likely come to us with a feature called Gemini Live.

Veo:


Google’s competitor to Sora, it can create long-form, 1080p videos from text prompts, claiming to simulate world physics. The samples don’t look as impressive as Sora’s, but there is a waitlist to try it.

Agents:


Google is entering the agents’ domain with variations like Gems (similar to GPTs), virtual teammates in workspaces, and end-to-end task completion via the Gemini app.

Other Announcements

  • MusicLM: Music AI sandbox with impressive demos and song integration on YouTube. MusicFx gets a new DJ mode.

  • Imagen 3: Google’s most advanced image generation model, heavily censored after its February blunder.

  • SynthID: Coming to text and video, to be open-sourced later this year.

  • TPU v6 (Trillium): Announced as part of Google’s infrastructure in the AI race.

  • Gemini Nano: Will be built into the Chrome Desktop client.

That’s a wrap on the key highlights from Google I/O 2024!

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