Google has been heavily focused on AI over the past year and this will likely continue for 2024, but the company has also had blunders in this field.
Google has revealed that 14 May is the scheduled date for its annual I/O event, with the latest iteration expected to bring another wave of AI-related products.
AI took centre stage at the tech giant’s 2023 I/O event, with Google revealing new large language models, general availability of its Bard chatbot – now known as Gemini – and AI features for various Google services.
The company teased that the upcoming 2024 event will also be packed with AI discussion, as it referred to developers being able to build various AI-powered applications thanks to “the Gemini era”.
“We’re excited to share what’s new for mobile, web and multiplatform development, and how to scale your applications in the cloud,” the company said in a blogpost.
Google initially teased the upcoming event with a puzzle that users had to solve to discover the date for the developer conference.
A crowded AI market
Google has been one of the big players in the generative AI boom the world witnessed in 2023. It revealed various AI-powered services including chatbots, image generators, search enhancements and more.
But the company has arguably been playing catch-up to Microsoft, which saw its revenue soar last year thanks to its ongoing partnership with OpenAI. While Microsoft was making waves in the search sector last year thanks to Bing being boosted by ChatGPT, Google released a promotional video where Bard answered a question incorrectly – impacting its image with the public.
Google released Gemini at the end of 2023 to take on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with the Google chatbot coming in three variants – Ultra, Pro and Nano. But the company went all-in with its “Gemini era” last month when it rebranded Bard and revealed a more powerful version of Gemini – known as Gemini Advanced.
But the image-generation tool of Gemini was recently shut down by Google, after various users complained that the chatbot kept creating historically inaccurate images.
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