Google is beta testing its AI future

It's clear that the future of Google is tied to AI language models. At this year's I/O conference, the company announced a raft of updates that rely on this technology, from new "multisearch" features that let you pair image searches with text queries to improvements for Google Assistant and support for 24 new languages in Google Translate. But Google -- and the field of AI language research in general -- faces major problems. Google itself has seriously mishandled internal criticism, firing employees who raised issues with bias in language models and damaging its reputation with the AI community. And researchers continue to find issues with AI language models, from failings with gender and racial biases to the fact that these models have a tendency to simply make things up (an unnerving finding for anyone who wants to use AI to deliver reliable information).