AI Secrets is your new weekly update on how AI is changing our everyday lives. Our experts will keep it clear and simple, so you can stay ahead of the game. This week we are focussing on PaLM2 and Google I/O.Share this with anyone you want to keep up to date.
A bigger Palm, a louder Bard đïžđž
Itâs been a rough six months for Google. A slow reaction to last winterâs explosion in chatbot hype left the firm looking sluggish and bloated, and their opening gambit went badly sour when Google Bard hallucinated astronomical data and wiped $100bn off of holding firm Alphabetâs market value. That incident clearly illustrated a simple fact of the modern AI landscape: Google is not playing for the same stakes as everybody else. This week, the reason why the stakes are so much higher for Google became clear.
Bardâs initial launch was tentative, unconvincing, and costly. At this weekâs Google I/O conference, Google launched a bigger AI product with a great deal more confidence and panache. PaLM2 is the upgraded version of PaLM, its GPT competitor language model, and it will not only power Google Bard, but also Bardâs integration into 25 applications across Googleâs sprawling suite of apps, popping up everywhere from spreadsheets and slideshows to Gmail and Colab. It remains to be seen how effectively this will be implemented, but the potential is enormous. Until now weâve only seen scratchy implementations of generative AI technology through awkward webpages, buried in Discord, or bolted onto existing apps for reasons that are often hard to discern. Soon, however, PaLM2âs services will be readily available - unavoidable, even - throughout the most popular office and productivity software on the planet, and this seems likely to herald a sudden and substantial change in the working lives of countless employees.
The upheaval does not stop there, but extends deep into the heart of Googleâs core business, search. From the companyâs earliest days, Google Search has remained roughly the same: 10 blue links, augmented over the years with sidebars and adverts, but fundamentally the same format since the late 1990s. Thatâs set to change with the launch of âSearch Generative Experienceâ, which places an AI snapshot of suggested results and further prompts center stage at the top of search results; itâs a clear and confident response to Microsoftâs challenger Bing Search, but also symbolically a huge change for Google.
One other remarkable announcement was that Google has partnered with Adobe to integrate Firefly, Abodeâs generative text-to-image app, into Bard. Fireflyâs image generation is a little underwhelming compared to rivals like Midjourney, or even Microsoftâs own Image Creator, but it has a crucial advantage; it is entirely trained on Adobeâs own libraries of stock images and user-generated content, and consequently untroubled by ruinous copyright lawsuits from furious artists and image libraries. Firefly will also be available throughout the complete suite of Google apps, and is likely to be a part of our working lives in the near future, so why not get a headstart on your colleagues with our comprehensive guide to mastering Adobe Firefly prompts?
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Fans went wild for rarities attributed to elusive superstar rapper Frank Ocean, paying thousands of dollars a time for recordings of supposed unpublished verses which were, of course, AI deepfakes.
Anthropic - creators of the popular AI Claude - have taken an unusual but highly effective route to safeguarding their creation: Claude has its own constitution that keeps it on the straight and narrow.
AI students at Princeton have teamed up with colleagues from Stanford and Google to create a GPT-powered cleaning robot that follows plain English spoken instructions, sorts, cleans and tidies.
Wendyâs will unveil its first AI-staffed drive-through in Columbus Ohio, next month, and reportedly the bot has been programmed to upsell hamburgers to customers. A recipe for success?
In one of the first examples of AI-fuelled industrial action, the Writerâs Guild of America is striking over demands for greater security from the threat of bot-generated writing in Hollywood.
The White House is beginning to discuss âadvancing potential new regulations and supporting new legislationâ to safeguard against the dangers of AI. By what - if anything - does that mean in practice?
