Google IO 2024: 5 Biggest AI Announcements
Google just unveiled a slew of new products and impressive AI updates in Google IO 2024. Here are my top 5 picks.
OpenAI vs Google is the biggest beef I’ve seen by far in the AI space.
Just one day after OpenAI unveiled its highly advanced and impressive GPT-4o model, Google fired back with several huge updates to Gemini and brand new AI products at the Google IO 2024 conference.
Honestly, the nearly 2-hour event was a lot to take in. While Google packed in numerous new and updated features, here are my top five picks that stood out:
1. Project Astra
2. Imagen 3 (Text-to-image)
3. Veo (Text-to-video)
4. Gemini in Google Search
5. Gemini in Google Photos
Let’s dive into each of these exciting developments.
1. Project Astra (Gemini Live)
Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind, showed off a very early version of Project Astra, a real-time, multimodal AI assistant aimed at becoming a universal assistant.
This is arguably the most intriguing new product Google unveiled, directly competing with OpenAI’s real-time voice assistant powered by GPT-4o.
According to Google, public access to Astra will come through the Gemini app later this year. The vision is to evolve beyond chatbots to AI agents that know everything about you and can work 24/7. Bots that don’t just talk with you but actually accomplish stuff on your behalf.
If this lives up to the hype, I would be very happy to use it on a daily basis.
2. Imagen 3 (Text-to-image)
It looks like Midjourney now has a strong competitor. The initial results shown at the demo look very promising. I mean just take a look at this example.
Prompt: Three women stand together laughing, with one woman slightly out of focus in the foreground. The sun is setting behind the women, creating a lens flare and a warm glow that highlights their hair and creates a bokeh effect in the background. The photography style is candid and captures a genuine moment of connection and happiness between friends. The warm light of the golden hour lends a nostalgic and intimate feel to the image.
It looks so photorealistic. Aside from better quality, Google also improved the model to produce better interpretation and better text generation. Here’s an example:
Prompt: Word “light” made from rainbow feathers, black background
It’s funny that they had to put “unedited raw output” below the image since Google has been widely criticized for faking demo images and videos.
3. Veo (Text-to-video)
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