Nico Grant, reporting for The New York Times:
Last month, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google’s founders, held several meetings with company executives. The topic: a rival’s new chatbot… [ChatGPT] has shaken Google out of its routine… Google now intends to unveil more than 20 new products and demonstrate a version of its search engine with chatbot features this year, according to a slide presentation reviewed by The New York Times
[…]
[Page and Brin] reviewed plans for products that were expected to debut at Google’s company conference in May, including Image Generation Studio, which creates and edits images, and a third version of A.I. Test Kitchen, an experimental app for testing product prototypes.
[…]
Other image and video projects in the works included a feature called Shopping Try-on, a YouTube green screen feature to create backgrounds; a wallpaper maker for the Pixel smartphone; an application called Maya that visualizes three-dimensional shoes; and a tool that could summarize videos by generating a new one, according to the slides.
[…]
Google executives hope to reassert their company’s status as a pioneer of A.I.
While many of the rumored products don’t sound particularly compelling to me, Google does indeed seem serious about this bet. Although they recently laid off more than 12,000 employees, almost none of those employees were working in their AI division.
I have no doubt that Google has all of the talent and resources required to become a leader in this space. The mystery is why they have been moving so slowly. Whether that is because of safety concerns, unclear monetization, or something else entirely is a question Google will need to sort out.