Pichai, who previously oversaw Chrome and Android, is famously product obsessed. In his first founder's letter as CEO in 2016, he predicted that "[w]e will move from mobile first to an AI first world." In the years since, Pichai has infused AI deeply into all of Google's products, from Android devices all the way up to the cloud. Despite that, the last year has largely been defined by the AI releases from another company, OpenAI. The rollout of DALL-E and GPT-3.5 last year, followed by GPT-4 this year, dominated the sector and kicked off an arms race between startups and tech giants alike.

Google DeepMind has announced its much-anticipated family of artificial intelligence chatbots, Gemini, which will compete with OpenAI's GPT series. According to Google, Gemini Ultra, its largest and most capable new model, outperforms OpenAI's most capable model, GPT-4, at a number of text-based, image-based, coding, and reasoning tasks. Gemini Ultra will be available through a new AI chat feature called Bard Advanced from early next year, the company said. It is currently being refined and is undergoing "trust and safety checks, including red-teaming by trusted external parties," according to the announcement. Google DeepMind also announced the launch of Gemini Pro, which is now available to the public through Google's Bard chat interface, and the smaller Gemini Nano, which will run on Google's Pixel 8 Pro smartphone.

However, a new, more powerful version of the OpenAI software is due to be released next year, with chief executive Sam Altman saying the firm's new products would make its current ones look like "a quaint relative".

Facebook owner Meta has been an AI player for years, hiring some of the field's smartest researchers and using the tech to help decide which of its users should see certain advertisements. In July, it doubled down on a very different approach to AI than its Big Tech rivals. It announced that Llama 2, its GPT4 competitor, would be "open source" -- available for anyone to download, modify and add to their own products for free. The approach won Meta plaudits from tech start-ups who were worried that Google, Microsoft and OpenAI would try to corner the market for advanced AI and squeeze out any competitors. But it's also been criticized for making it easier for people to use AI for malicious purposes.

OpenAI's spot atop the generative AI heap may be coming to an end as Google officially introduced its most capable large language model to date on Wednesday, dubbed Gemini 1.0. It's the first of "a new generation of AI models, inspired by the way people understand and interact with the world," CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a Google blog post. "Ever since programming AI for computer games as a teenager, and throughout my years as a neuroscience researcher trying to understand the workings of the brain, I've always believed that if we could build smarter machines, we could harness them to benefit humanity in incredible ways," Pichai continued. The result of extensive collaboration between Google's DeepMind and Research divisions, Gemini has all the bells and whistles cutting-edge genAIs have to offer. "Its capabilities are state-of-the-art in nearly every domain," Pichai declared.

Undoubtedly, 2023 has been the year of generative AI, and Google is marking its end with even more AI developments. The company has announced the creation of its most powerful TPU (formally known as Tensor Processing Units) yet, Cloud TPU v5p, and an AI Hypercomputer from Google Cloud. "The growth in [generative] AI models -- with a tenfold increase in parameters annually over the past five years -- brings heightened requirements for training, tuning, and inference," Amin Vahdat, Google's Engineering Fellow and Vice President for the Machine Leaning, Systems, and Cloud AI team, said in a release. The Cloud TPU v5p is an AI accelerator, training and serving models. Google designed Cloud TPUs to work with models that are large, have long training periods, are mostly made of matrix computations and have no custom operations inside its main training loop, such as TensorFlow or JAX.

Increasing talk of artificial intelligence developing with potentially dangerous speed is hardly slowing things down. A year after OpenAI launched ChatGPT and triggered a new race to develop AI technology, Google today revealed an AI project intended to reestablish the search giant as the world leader in AI. Gemini, a new type of AI model that can work with text, images, and video, could be the most important algorithm in Google's history after PageRank, which vaulted the search engine into the public psyche and created a corporate giant. An initial version of Gemini starts to roll out today inside Google's chatbot Bard for the English language setting. It will be available in more than 170 countries and territories.

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It was a strange Thanksgiving for Sam Altman. Normally, the CEO of OpenAI flies home to St. Louis to visit family. But this time the holiday came after an existential struggle for control of a company that some believe holds the fate of humanity in its hands. He went to his Napa Valley ranch for a hike, then returned to San Francisco to spend a few hours with one of the board members who had just fired and reinstated him in the span of five frantic days. He put his computer away for a few hours to cook vegetarian pasta, play loud music, and drink wine with his fiancé Oliver Mulherin. "This was a 10-out-of-10 crazy thing to live through," Altman tells TIME on Nov. 30. We're speaking exactly one year after OpenAI released Chat-GPT, the most rapidly adopted tech product ever. The impact of the chatbot and its successor, GPT-4, was transformative--for the company and the world. "For many people," Altman says, 2023 was "the year that they started taking AI seriously." Born as a nonprofit research lab dedicated to building artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity, OpenAI became an $80 billion rocket ship. Altman emerged as one of the most powerful and venerated executives in the world, the public face and leading prophet of a technological revolution. On Nov. 17, OpenAI's nonprofit board of directors fired Altman, without warning or even much in the way of explanation. The surreal maneuvering that followed made the corporate dramas of Succession seem staid. So did OpenAI's powerful investors; one even baselessly speculated that one of the directors who defenestrated Altman was a Chinese spy. The company's visionary chief scientist voted to oust his fellow co-founder, only to backtrack. Two interim CEOs came and went.

Microsoft says its Copilot AI chatbot is integrating with OpenAI's latest GPT model and the image generator DALL-E 3, among other upgrades. GPT-4 Turbo integration will help Copilot users tackle even more complex tasks. While the last generation allowed for up to 50 pages of text as a data input, GPT-4 Turbo accepts up to 300 pages, which should make for more meaningful (and accurate, I hope) responses to queries. The newest DALL-E 3 image generation model should generate higher-quality images, with better accuracy for your prompts. Beyond the OpenAI collaborations, Copilot's Inline Compose tool now includes a rewrite menu, so you can select a block of text (in Edge) and get a bot-edited version.