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Google’s I/O Conference Presents Modest Vision of the Future


SAN FRANCISCO – There was a time when Google offered a great vision of the future. driverless cars, augmented reality glassesunlimited storage of emails and photos, and prediction texts To complete the following sentences.

More modest Google showcased Wednesday as the company kicked off its annual developer conference. The Google of 2022 is more pragmatic and sensible – a bit more like its business-oriented rivals at Microsoft than a fantasy playground for tech geeks.

And this, apparently, is by design. The bold vision is still there – but far away. The professional executives who now run Google are increasingly focusing on extracting money from research and development spending in those years.

The company’s biggest bet on artificial intelligence doesn’t mean science fiction has come to life, at least for now. It means more subtle changes to existing products.

“AI improves our products, makes them more useful, more accessible, and delivers innovative new features for everyone,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement Wednesday.

In a short presentation of the wow moments, Google emphasized that its products are “useful”. In fact, Google executives used the words “help”, “helpful”, or “helpful” more than 50 times during their two-hour keynote; this included a marketing campaign for new hardware products: “When it comes to helping, we can’t help but help.”

It introduced a cheaper version of its Pixel smartphone, a smartwatch with a round screen, and a new tablet next year. (“The most useful tablet in the world.”)

The biggest round of applause came from a new Google Docs feature where the company’s AI algorithms automatically summarize a long document in a single paragraph.

At the same time, it wasn’t immediately clear how some of the other groundbreaking work, such as language models that better understand natural speech or can logically break a task down into smaller steps, would eventually lead to the next generation of computing technology owned by Google. launched.

Surely some new ideas look useful. In a demonstration about how Google continues to improve its search technology, the company showed a feature calledmultiple search”, where a user can take a photo of a shelf full of chocolates and then find the best reviewed nut-free dark chocolate from the image.

In another example, Google showed you how to find a picture of a particular dish, such as Korean stir-fried noodles, and then search for nearby restaurants serving that dish.

Many of these capabilities are powered by years of deep technology work by Google. machine learning, image recognition and natural language comprehension. For Google and other big tech giants, this is a sign of evolution rather than revolution.

Many companies can create digital services easier and faster than in the past thanks to shared technologies such as cloud computing and storage, but building basic infrastructure such as artificial intelligence language models is so costly and time-consuming that only the wealthiest companies can do it. invest in them.

As is often the case at Google events, the company didn’t take a moment to explain how it made money. After another hour of announcements, Google brought up the issue of advertising, which still accounts for 80 percent of the company’s revenue, and highlighted a new feature called My Ad Center. It allows users to request fewer ads from certain brands or highlight topics they would like to see more ads on.



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