Google I/O, the search giant’s annual conference kicked off yesterday.

New Devices & New Hype

As the world’s predominant search engine, Google has struggle lately. Google commands a whopping 90+% of the search market and there’s really nowhere to go.

But…

Search is fundamentally broken as it’s becoming harder and harder to discover new things on an Internet that’s heavily supported by advertising.

Google is promising to bring new AI integrations with Bard and PaLM, as well as new riffs on smartphones.

Infamous Pixel Leak

Google is slated to announce a new Pixel Fold device at Google I/O. Thing is. They leaked the commercial featuring NBA player Giannis Antetokounmpo a day before it was scheduled.

We talked about foldable phones and tablets before and how they’ve yet to take off. Seriously. How many foldable phones and tablets have you seen in the wild? Google is still trying to pursue the dream WestWorld.

The Pixel Fold, the Pixel Tablet, and the Pixel 7A round out this year’s hardware lineup. Google claims 280 million people are using phones running Android and taking 32,000 snapshots a second.

The Pixel Fold checks in at a whopping $1,800 with preorders happening now and going on sales in June. The 11-inch Pixel Tablet clocks in at $499. The Pixel 7A goes on sales for $549.

A Push for AI

Google is actually running behind in the AI race. Bard made an unspectacular debut after ChatGPT owned the AI space for all of 2023. Then, Microsoft took the leap and integrated ChatGPT into Bing search beating the search giant to the punch with an AI enabled product.

No one uses Bing, but it matters as Google is trying to figure out more ways of getting ad dollars out of search.

The company is pushing it’s own large language model, Bard, and its multi-modal AI, PaLM. They’re showcasing a Flip Card game utilizing a text-to-image generator called Muse with the PaLM API.

It ain’t Yu-Gi-Oh!

Google debuted AI-powered search. Users can opt-in to a feature called SGE, or Search Generative Experience, and Google search will provide AI generated context for your search results and snapshots of pages. These features are powered by Google’s own LLM, PaLM 2.

Google has also opened up Bard to everyone. No waiting lists to join. Bard is Google’s ChatGPT competitor and we can finally begin pitting them head-to-head.

New Android devices will also get embedded AI. Android will give users the ability to create their own wallpapers using Bard technology backed by Adobe’s image base. Users can describe the type of image they want to set for their wallpaper and Android will make it happen.

Google also announced Duet. Duet is a competitor to Microsoft Office’s Copilot AI. Duet will provide help to Google Docs, Sheets, and Gmail users when they need to write emails and work on documents.

Welcome to our bright future, or the beginning of the dystopian. We haven’t figured out killer apps for AI applications but they will be here soon.