Having combined the Brain Team and DeepMind into a single unit, Google aims to take a ‘safe and responsible’ approach to developing its artificial intelligence systems, said Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai during the Q1 earnings call.
AI opportunities
The company says it will stick to its commitment to “invest responsibly and with discipline,” with machine learning being a main area where the tech giant strives to operate cost-effectively, and “with greater velocity”, per the CEO.
Pichai stated:
We have significant multiyear efforts underway to create savings, such as improving machine utilization and finding more scalable and efficient ways to train and serve machine learning models. We are making our data centres more efficient, redistributing workloads and equipment where servers aren’t being fully used. This is important work as we continue to significantly invest in infrastructure to drive our many AI opportunities.
Since the company released its conversational chatbot AI ‘Bard’ in March, it has made inroads such as adding its PaLM model to the algorithm, owing to the merge of the DeepMind and Brain teams. The API allows Bard to help with programming tasks, which include generating programming code.
On its April 25 earnings call, Google revealed its PaLM API and its new MakerSuite tool for developers. The tool allows developers to access the large language models (LLMs) and to start building new generative AI applications. He continued:
A number of organizations are using our generative AI large language models across Google Cloud platform, Google Workspace and our cybersecurity offerings.
The company added generative AI to its cloud offerings and customers, noting that Google is the only cloud provider with NVIDIA’s new L4 Tensor Core GPU with its new G2 Virtual Machines, which are “purpose-built for large inference AI workloads, such as generative AI.”
The Cloud segment generated $7.45 billion in revenues for Alphabet in Q1, up from $5.82 billion in the year-ago quarter. Pichai added that 60% of the world’s 1,000 biggest companies are Google Cloud customers.
Artificial intelligence: new internet search horizons
Alphabet’s CEO said the company aims to “unlock entirely new experiences in Search and beyond” as it AI capacities evolve “just as camera, voice and translation technologies have all opened entirely new categories of queries and exploration.”
Answering a question from JPMorgan’s Douglas Anmuth regarding Bard’s integration into search products, Pichai said that the company has launched Bard as a complementary product to Search, but is looking to bring LLM experiences “more natively into Search.”
However, he noted that the company plans to roll such experiences out in an “incremental way” in order to test it, create and innovate.
I think overall, I think it can apply to a broad range of queries. So I think I’m excited that it can allow us to better help users in a category of queries, maybe in which there was no right answer, and they are more creative, et cetera. So I think those are opportunities. But even in our existing query categories, where we get a chance to do some heavy lifting for the users and we use AI to better give — guide them, I think you will see us exploring in those directions as well. It’s early days, but I think there’s a lot of innovation to come.
Excited about AI development verticals, Pichai underlined the potential for LLMs to assist Google’s businesses, and said company will share updates at Google I/O on how it is using AI across its products, including the Pixel devices, and will also share new developments for Android.
We have used AI to open up access to knowledge in powerful ways. We’ll continue to incorporate generative AI advances to make Search better in a thoughtful and deliberate way. We’ll be guided by data and years of experience about what people want and our high standards for quality. And we’ll test and iterate as we go because we know that billions of people trust Google to provide the right information.
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