Alphabet debuts beefed-up AI search and chatbot as competition heats up

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (Reuters):  Google parent Alphabet, opens new tab on Tuesday showed how it is building on artificial intelligence across its businesses, including a beefed-up Gemini chatbot and improvements to its prized search engine as it races to compete with AI rivals.

The flurry of announcements underscores Google's efforts to refresh its products since Microsoft-backed (MSFT.O), opens new tab OpenAI’s 2022 launch of ChatGPT dazzled the public, threatening the incumbent's Among Google’s latest salvos was an addition to its family of Gemini 1.5 AI models known as Flash that is faster and cheaper to run; a prototype called Project Astra, which can talk to users about anything captured on their smartphone camera in real time; and search results categorized under AI-generated headlines.

"This is a moment of growth and opportunity," Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told reporters, when asked if the AI updates could risk Google’s profitable business.

The product presentation at Google's annual I/O developer event in Mountain View, California, followed a shorter showcase by rival OpenAI on Monday. OpenAI demonstrated how ChatGPT could voice answers with human-like intonation to any written or visual prompt. The startup's CEO, Sam Altman, wrote that OpenAI had delivered software that "feels like AI from the movies."

Google’s news at times covered similar ground, underscoring the fierce competition between the two AI developers.

Germany based neuro robotics building a bot – dubbed 4NE-1 – to do things like take out the garbage. Boss David Reger swears the droids don't plan on anything more for anyone.

For instance, Alphabet’s AI unit, Google DeepMind, has worked to build technology that can carry out day-to-day tasks for consumers. Early results have manifested in Project Astra, a tool that can use a smartphone camera and draw conclusions about the world around it.

In a demo video shown during Google I/O, a user deployed it to identify a speaker and locate glasses they had left in another part of the room. The company also teased how it could pair Project Astra with what it calls Gemini Live, a potentially more natural-sounding voice and text aide than its Google Assistant of the past.

Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, said of the work behind Project Astra: "We wanted to build a universal AI agent that can be truly helpful in everyday life."

Another area in which Google showed how it is facing off against competitors was video generation. The company teased Veo, an AI model that can spin up 1080p-resolution videos lasting longer than a minute, available to approved creators on a preview basis, filmmaker Donald Glover among them. OpenAI has promoted film-conjuring software of its own among Hollywood executives, enthralling and worrying the creative industry.

Google also announced improvements to its Gemini Pro 1.5 model that is capable of making sense of a massive amount of data. On Tuesday, it said it was doubling that amount, to 2 million tokens, meaning the AI potentially could answer questions when given thousands of pages of text or more than an hour of video to ingest.

The Pro model - starting with prompt sizes of up to 1 million tokens, or pieces of data - will also be available to subscribers to Google’s Gemini Advanced service.

Alphabet shares were up 1% at $172.59 on Tuesday afternoon.long reign over online search and AI.