"Book a family vacation with artificial intelligence? At its developer conference, Google outlined its plans for so-called AI agents for the first time - and announced more AI for its search engine.
The Internet company Google is integrating generative artificial intelligence (AI) into its search engine across the board. The US company announced this on Tuesday evening at its I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California.
In recent months, Google says it has intensively tested the "AI overviews" function. The function no longer spits out the usual lists of links, but instead searches for its information itself from suitable websites and then gives users a summary in a few sentences. The "AI overviews" are now available to all users in the United States. Other countries are to follow.
The new AI function is based on an adapted version of the Gemini AI model and has led to higher usage and greater satisfaction with the search engine among test subjects, said Liz Reid, who is responsible for the search engine business at Google. In addition, the links that appear in the AI summaries are clicked on significantly more often than via traditional search.
This is unlikely to be of much reassurance to media companies, online retailers and others who rely on clicks via Google. They fear that the rules by which the links in the AI answers are selected do not correspond to those that make websites appear at the top of the classic search engine. And the AI answers also pose a dilemma for Google because they call into question the current business model: ads that occupy the top spots in the search results are Google's biggest moneymaker.
Google: AI does not replace classic search
Artificial intelligence will not replace the classic search engine, Reid emphasized. Instead, it would be used for particularly complex questions for which users would previously have needed several classic search queries. Reid cited the search for a new yoga studio as an example: with one search query, users will in future be able to ask what the best yoga studios in a city are, what the entry prices are and how far they are from their home. These multi-step queries will be tested shortly.
The situation is similar with planning functions. In the future, Google users will be able to put together meal plans and vacations within the search engine. For example, they would only have to enter "Create me a 3-day meal plan for four people that is easy to prepare" and they would receive a plan with recipes from the Internet that can then be easily adapted with further commands. More categories such as parties, dates or training plans are to follow.
"We are still in the very early stages when it comes to AI agents"
With these functions, Google is venturing for the first time into the area of so-called AI agents that are intended to carry out entire chains of tasks autonomously. "We are still in the very early stages when it comes to AI agents," said Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The functions are based on Google's most powerful AI model, Gemini 1.5, for which Google announced a number of updates, among other things.
Google was particularly proud to present the new capability of a 2 million token context window. This window determines how large the files can be that can be loaded into the models for analysis. According to Google, this means that the AI model can be fed with a video of up to two hours. For comparison: rival Open AI and its flagship model GPT-4 Turbo only fit 128,000 tokens in the search window.
Tokens are the unit for AI models. For example, in ChatGPT, a token is valid for an average of four letters.
Demis Hassabis, head of Google's research division Deep Mind, outlined Google's plans for the future of autonomous AI assistants for the first time at I/O under the name "Project Astra". "Project Astra" should be able to process not only text and voice input, but also moving images.
The AI recognizes "Schrödinger's cat"
In an advertising video, a person instructed the artificial intelligence, among other things, to let them know when it recognized something that was making noise. When the smartphone camera films a loudspeaker, the AI responds. The person behind the smartphone draws an arrow on the upper part of the speaker and asks what this part of the speaker is called. The AI correctly answers that it is the "tweeter" that transmits high frequencies.
Later, Google shows the stylized drawings of a dead and a living cat on a white board, in front of which a person holds a box with a question mark on it. "What does that remind you of?" asks the person in the advertising video. "Schrödinger’s cat," the AI assistant replies.
Gemini's video processing capabilities will also be used in Google search. Google wants to test a function that works similarly to reverse image search, only with videos. Users will then be able to upload video recordings, for example of a used record player whose needle keeps jumping off. Google will then make repair suggestions based on the video.
The video was very reminiscent of the presentation by Google's rival Open AI the day before. With the help of the new AI model GPT4-o, ChatGPT is to become a voice assistant. Open AI demonstrated, among other things, live translation from other languages and the solving of a mathematical equation or software code problems based on moving images. At Google, too, the AI recognizes the function of filmed code on a screen in the advertising video.
In addition, Google announced "Veo", a response to Open AI's video AI Sora, as well as a new version of the AI model Gemini called Gemini 1.5 Flash. The model is not supposed to be quite as powerful, but faster and more efficient.
After a series of glitches, Google is under pressure to catch up with Open AI when it comes to AI. Most recently, Google switched off image generation in its AI chatbot Gemini because the AI was depicting black people in Wehrmacht uniforms for false diversity reasons. The chatbot also refused to decide whether Elon Musk or Adolf Hitler was "worse." [1]
1. So will Google Künstliche Intelligenz in seiner Suchmaschine nutzen. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (online) Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH. May 14, 2024. Von Maximilian Sachse
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