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Wednesday’s top story: Many AI updates were announced yesterday, at Google’s I/O developer conference, but one of the biggest, most game-changing, was its new AI search features. 🔍
🌤️ This Morning on AI Tool Report
📈 Google's game-changing AI search
🚨OpenAI co-founder quits
📹 Meet Veo: Google’s Sora rival
✈️ Expedia's new holiday AI tools
Read Time: 5 minutes
Wednesday’s newsletter is in partnership with EleventhAI ⚙️
STOCK MARKETS
SEARCH
Our Report: During the first day of its I/O developer conference, Google announced that it’s radically changing its search functionality by adding more advanced AI-powered features, powered by its large language model, Gemini.
🔑 Key Points:
AI Overviews—which summarizes search results with AI (and has been tested for a year)—will be rolled out to the US this week, and over 1B people, worldwide, by the end of 2024.
Google Lens (its visual search tool) will enable users to receive search results using video footage, not just images, “to make it easier to tell Google what you’re looking for”.
A new planning tool will auto-create personalized itineraries and meal plans based on previous interactions, and search results will be organized based on the context of a query.
🤔 Why you should care: To address criticism around how AI-powered search engines summarize information without sending users to the source of information—affecting journalism and businesses—Google has established it will not provide AI overviews for every search, just when a query is complex, and has said that previous testing has shown that people do visit websites as people still want a human perspective.
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INTERNAL POLITICS
Our Report: OpenAI co-founder and Chief Scientist—Ilya Sutskever—has quit, just one day after the launch of GPT-4o, its newest AI model.
🔑 Key Points:
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman applauded Sutskever’s contributions in shaping the company’s research and development, calling him “easily one of the greatest minds of our generation.”
Although Sutskever hasn’t shared what he’s doing next, he has indicated that he will be working on a “project that is very personally meaningful…I will share details in due time.”
OpenAI’s Director of Research—Jakub Pachocki—will replace Sutskever, using his experience in large-scale, deep-learning optimization to shape the company’s future direction.
🤔 Why you should care: Sutskever’s departure comes a day after the launch of GPT-4o, follows a board dispute in November (which he started and got Altman fired, and then rehired), and coincides with the exit of Jan Leike, who led the Superalignment team—which focused on responsible AI development—leaving many speculating that Sutskever had become increasingly frustrated with Altman’s rush to launch AI-powered products at the expense of AI safety.
TEXT-TO-VIDEO
📹 Meet Veo: Google’s Sora rival
Our Report: Google also announced, at its I/O developer conference, its own AI text-to-video model—Veo—and it’s a direct rival to OpenAI’s Sora, launched just three months ago.
🔑 Key Points:
Veo reportedly creates 1-minute long, 1080p videos from text, image, and video prompts, making it the same type of tool, with the same resolution as Sora, on its highest setting.
It understands phrases like “timelapse” or “aerial shots of a landscape” and Google says its videos are “more consistent and coherent,” with more realistic movement.
Veo has no launch date or rollout plan, but Google is inviting select filmmakers and creators to test it, to ensure “creators have a voice” in how Google develops its AI technologies.
🤔 Why you should care: According to Google DeepMind CEO—Demis Hassabis—Veo has a more advanced interface that allows users to further edit videos, using additional prompts, which is something Sora doesn’t currently do.
P.S. Keep reading to see what else Google announced at the I/O conference ⬇️
TRAVEL
✈️ Expedia's new holiday AI tools
Our Report: Online travel agency—Expedia—is testing an AI-powered assistant (called Romie) and an AI-powered “smart search” to help with traveling-related tasks.
🔑 Key Points:
AI chatbot Romie has been trained on in-house and OpenAI models and pulls in data from sources like AccuWeather and Yelp to give real-time information on flights and weather.
It also helps travelers with tasks like searching for hotels, building itineraries, and planning trips, and users can talk to it, one-on-one, in WhatsApp, or in group chats on iMessenger.
The AI-powered search feature lets users describe what they’re searching for—rather than selecting filters—and this and Romie are currently being tested with a select US audience.
🤔 Why you should care: Expedia introduced an in-app travel planning tool (which used ChatGPT to help plan itineraries) last year and is bolstering its core feature set with AI to keep up with rivals, such as Booking.com, which launched its AI-powered trip planning feature last year.
🍔 Quick hits (Google I/O conference round-up)
A round-up of the key AI announcements Google has made, so far, at its I/O developer conference in Hawaii:
Ask Photos: Can search your Google photos and answer questions like “What is my license plate number?"
AI personal assistants: Can go through emails, fill out forms, and set appointments to help complete complex tasks, like returning clothes.
Project Astra: Is a new AI Agent that can respond to real-life environments, in real-time, including establishing where a misplaced item was last seen.
Nano: Runs on mobile devices and uses AI to detect and intercept suspicious calls.
LearnLM: Is a family of language models trained with educational research for teachers and students.
Gemini 1.5 Pro and Gemini 1.5 Flash: These are new versions of Gemini, Pro is built to support the new features demonstrated at I/O, and Gemini 1.5 Flash is the same as Pro, but faster.
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