Google turns to AI as it lays off 12,000 employees

By Fionna Agomuoh Published January 20, 2023

Google now has plans to step up its introduction of AI products in the wake of highly popular technology competition, such as the AI chatbot ChatGPT developed by OpenAI, according to The New York Times.

Google, which is run by the parent company Alphabet has been cautious about adding artificial intelligence-based technology to its service lineup. However, it now has plans to announce more than 20 AI-powered projects throughout 2023, the publication added.

A Google search page for most popular movie of 2022 is shown falling into a vortex. — Google

The plans to transition toward AI were couched in its announcement of the recent layoff of 12,000 Google employees.

Recommended Videos

Google is already known to have invested heavily in artificial intelligence. However, the Times also indicated that Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai enlisted the advice of company founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who stepped back from active roles as of 2019. They were reportedly involved in all-hands meetings with executives in December 2022, where they were able to “approve plans and pitch ideas,” The Verge reports.

Google’s AI products coming down the pike could potentially be announced at its I/O developers conference in May. Primarily, the brand might showcase a demo of its own AI chatbot, which will have a focus on ethics and information accuracy.

The Times report also indicates Google’s plans to announce an image studio that can generate and edit images, a browser called MakerSuite that includes tools for businesses to create AI prototypes, and several coding tools. One is called PaLM-Coder 2, which works similarly to Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot. The other is called Colab + Android Studio and works for building smartphone apps.

Google’s prior concerns were that pushing too hard on AI could negatively affect the industry’s view of the brand, but now the company appears to be worried about being left behind. In addition to the ChatGPT chatbot, many text-to-image generators have caught the internet’s attention in recent weeks, as have a number of AI-powered productivity platforms.

Other big tech brands have also stated their intent to showcase AI on their legacy products and services. Microsoft has reported on its plans to work with the GPT-3 language to potentially implement AI features into its Office Suite, including Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint.

Computing Writer

Fionna Agomuoh is a Computing Writer at Digital Trends. She covers a range of topics in the computing space, including…

Topics

Computing

ChatGPT models explained: How to use each, according to OpenAI

ChatGPT models list.

Although the entire AI boom was triggered by just one ChatGPT model, a lot has changed since 2022. New models have been released, old models have been replaced, updates roll out and roll back again when they go wrong -- the world of LLMs is pretty busy. At the moment, we have six OpenAI LLMs to choose from and, as both users and Sam Altman are aware, their names are completely useless.

Most people have probably just been using the newest model they can get their hands on, but it turns out that each of the six current models is good at different things -- and OpenAI has finally decided to tell us which model to use for which tasks.

Computing

5 AI apps with deep research features to rival ChatGPT

Deep Research option for ChatGPT.

Artificial intelligence brands are in fierce competition, and their next steps are to make AI tools smarter by allowing them to execute deep search functions that can provide expert-level results and analyze larger amounts of information in a shorter time. Several companies have announced deep research features in recent weeks and months that excel in areas such as finance, science, marketing, and academics. Research that would have taken a person weeks or months can be achieved in a fraction of the time, with a properly detailed prompt.

Deep research features are considered AI agents that can work independently and will allow you to make a query and let the AI process for several minutes while it generates the information and returns when it is finished to display the results. They are considered the first steps toward the concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which some define as a model that can process a query based on novel data that it has not been trained on, and it can produce unique content. However, we’re not quite there yet, and the main premise of deep research tools is processing large amounts of data and making it easier to understand.

Computing

You can now interact with Google’s AI Mode in search results

Google AI Mode

Google has been working on adding more AI features to its Search feature, and now an integrated AI Mode is being rolled out to the public. Different from the AI Overview function that Google has included as a default part of Search since last year, the AI Mode is a chatbot which users can interact with as part of their search results.

AI Mode has previously only been available as a Google Labs experiment, but now Google says that it will be coming to search for "a small percentage of people" in the U.S. over the coming weeks. Those who are part of the test will see an "AI Mode" tab in Search, and clicking on it will bring up information related to your search from the chatbot.