But they’ve long been keen to bring AI into Google’s products. Vic Gundotra, a former senior vice president at Google, said he gave Mr. Page a demonstration of a new Gmail feature around 2008. But Mr. Page was unimpressed with the effort, asking, “Why can’t it auto-write that email?” for you?” In 2014, Google also acquired DeepMind, a leading AI research lab in London.
Google’s Advanced Technology Review Council, a panel of executives that includes Jeff Dean, the company’s senior vice president of research and artificial intelligence, and Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer, came less than two weeks after ChatGPT debuted gathered to discuss their company’s initiatives, according to the slide presentation.
They reviewed plans for products expected to appear at Google’s corporate conference in May, including Image Generation Studio, which creates and edits images, and a third version of AI Test Kitchen, an experimental app for testing product prototypes.
Other image and video projects in the works include a feature called Shopping Try-on, a YouTube green screen feature to create backgrounds; a wallpaper maker for the Pixel smartphone; an application called Maya that visualizes three-dimensional shoes; and a tool that can summarize videos by generating a new one, according to the slides.
Google has a list of AI programs it wants to offer software developers and other companies, including image creation technology, that could boost revenue for Google’s Cloud division. There are also tools to help other companies create their own AI prototypes in Internet browsers called MakerSuite, which will have two “Pro” versions, according to the presentation.
In May, Google also expects to announce a tool to make it easier to build apps for Android smartphones, called Colab + Android Studio, which will generate, complete and fix code, according to the presentation. Another code generation and completion tool called PaLM-Coder 2 is also in the works.
Google executives hope to confirm their company’s status as a pioneer in AI. The company has been working aggressively on AI for the past decade and has already offered a small number of people a chatbot that could rival ChatGPT, called LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications.
