That Google I/O show sure was something, wasn’t it? It was a roaring two hours of non-stop AI talk without a break. Bard, Palm, Duet, Unicorn, Gecko, Gemini, Tailwind, Otter – there were so many cryptic AI codenames it was hard to keep track of what Google was talking about. A glossary of terms would have really helped. The highlight, of course, was the hardware, but even that was talked about as an AI delivery system.
Google is in a total panic over the rise of OpenAI and its flagship product, ChatGPT, which has thrilled Wall Street and has the potential to raise some of the questions people would normally type on Google.com. It’s an embarrassing situation for Google, especially for CEO Sundar Pichai, who’s been spouting an “AI first” mantra for about seven years and doesn’t care much about it. Google has been trying to get consumers excited about AI for years, but people didn’t seem to care until someone other than Google took a swing at it.
Even more embarrassing is that ChatGPT’s rise is built on Google’s technology. The “T” in “ChatGPT” stands for “transformer”, a neural network technique that Google invented in 2017 and has never commercialized. OpenAI took Google’s public research, built a product around it, and is now using that product to threaten Google.
In the months before I/O, Pichai issued a “Code Red” warning company-wide, saying that ChatGPT was something Google needed to fight, and it even lashed out its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin their pension to help . Years ago, Google freaked out about Facebook and required all employees to build social features into Google’s existing applications. And while that was a widely hated initiative that ultimately failed, Google is dusting off that Google+ playbook to combat OpenAI. It is now reportedly mandatory for all employees to build some sort of AI feature into every Google product.
“Mandatory AI” is certainly what Google I/O felt like. At each part of the presentation, a department at Google gave a book report on the new AI thing they’ve been working on for the past six months. Google I/O felt more like a presentation for Google executives than a show designed to excite developers and consumers. The AI directive led to ridiculous situations, such as Android’s chief engineering officer going on stage to talk only about an AI-powered poop emoji background generator instead of any meaningful OS improvements.
Wall Street investors apparently were one group excited about Google I/O — the company’s stock rose 4 percent after the show. Maybe that was the point of all this.
An AI show without Google Assistant mentions?
Would you believe Google got Assistant zero listings at Google I/O? This show was all about AI and Google didn’t name its biggest AI product. Pichai’s seminal 2016 “AI First” blog post is about Google Assistant and includes an image of Pichai for the Google Assistant logo. Google highlighted previous AI projects like Gmail’s Smart Reply and Smart Compose, Google Photos’ magic eraser and AI-powered search, Deepmind’s AlphaGo, and Google Lens, but the Google Assistant failed to manage a single entry. That seemed entirely on purpose.
Heck, Google introduced a product that was a follow-up to the Nest Hub Google Assistant smart display – the Pixel Tablet – and Google Assistant still couldn’t get a listing. At one point, the host even said that the Pixel Tablet had a “voice activated helper”.
Google’s avoidance of Google Assistant at I/O seemed like a further deprioritization of what used to be its primary AI product. The last major Assistant product launch was two years ago, in March 2021. Since then, Google shipped hardware that dropped Assistant support from Nest Wi-Fi and Fitbit, and it disabled Assistant commands on Waze. It lost a Sonos patent case and removed key speaker functionality, such as volume control, from the cast feature. Assistant driving mode was retired in 2022 and one of the Assistant’s biggest features, reminders, is being shut down in favor of Google Tasks reminders.
The Pixel tablet certainly seemed to be a new Google Assistant device, as it looks exactly like all other Google Assistant devices, but Google shipped it without a dedicated smart display interface. It seems that it was conceived when the assistant was a viable product at Google and then shipped as leftover hardware when the assistant had fallen out of favor.
The Google Assistant team has reportedly been asked to stop working on its own product and focus on improving Bard. The assistant has never actually made any money in his seven years; the hardware is all sold at cost, speech recognition servers are expensive to run, and Assistant has no viable post-sale revenue streams such as advertising. Anecdotally, it seems that the power for those speech recognition servers is being turned all the way down, as Assistant commands seem to be taking a few seconds to process lately.
