The apple blossoms are sprouting, the sun is finally rising before your alarm goes off, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai is wiping down the lenses of his Gemini-powered smart glasses. You know what that means: It's once again time for Google I/O. Google is going all out for its annual I/O developer conference, which begins on Tuesday, May 20. The event is taking place at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, just down the road from Google's headquarters. The keynote starts at 10 am PDT on Tuesday, and as usual, it will be livestreamed.

OpenAI just launched its AI search update for ChatGPT. Three months after the company's initial announcement of a SearchGPT prototype, OpenAI's vision for the future of AI search is now available to the public. "We're focused on making ChatGPT the best place to answer any question, including live information from the web," says Adam Fry, the product lead for search on ChatGPT. Referred to by Fry now as "ChatGPT search" rather than "SearchGPT," the feature enters an increasingly crowded and contentious field of AI search options for users--with competition from smaller startups, like Perplexity, as well as tech giants, like Google with its AI Overview search results. So far in 2024, journalists have criticized both Google and Perplexity's implementations of AI search for improperly copying aspects of original work and hallucinating fake information.

Google Photos has a decent search experience right now. I was recently trying to find some photos of my sister's engagement from a few years ago, and a simple "yellow dress" with her name added in front brought all the images to my fingertips within moments. But Google thinks it can do even better and is now supercharging the search function with improvements to natural language processing and, you guessed it, artificial intelligence. Improving the search experience is crucial because our online photo libraries are getting bigger and bigger every year. That means it's harder to find those photos from Dad's 60th birthday without sifting through so much other stuff.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capability in reasoning and planning when integrated with tree-search-based prompting methods. However, since these methods ignore the previous search experiences, they often make the same mistakes in the search process. To address this issue, we introduce Reflection on search Trees (RoT), an LLM reflection framework designed to improve the performance of tree-search-based prompting methods. It uses a strong LLM to summarize guidelines from previous tree search experiences to enhance the ability of a weak LLM. The guidelines are instructions about solving this task through tree search which can prevent the weak LLMs from making similar mistakes in the past search process. In addition, we proposed a novel state selection method, which identifies the critical information from historical search processes to help RoT generate more specific and meaningful guidelines. In our extensive experiments, we find that RoT significantly improves the performance of LLMs in reasoning or planning tasks with various tree-search-based prompting methods (e.g., BFS and MCTS). Non-tree-search-based prompting methods such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) can also benefit from RoT guidelines since RoT can provide task-specific knowledge collected from the search experience.

There's no question about it: LAI is the new hotness in personal computers. An intriguing new report claims Microsoft will push the pedal to the metal even harder with a revolutionary new version of Windows 11 (or 12?) in 2024, which is designed to make AI helpful at deeply practical levels. Microsoft just put AI front-and-center with Windows 11's massive 2023 Update, which added the Windows Copilot AI assistant and awesome AI "Cocreator" features to Paint. Copilot is coming to Windows 10, too. And Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm have been busy integrating AI-boosting "NPUs" (neural processing units) to the PC chips destined to hit the streets next year, aiming to enhance tasks with local AI that runs on your computer's hardware rather than hitting up servers in the cloud.

Artificial intelligence has become an increasingly popular tool for businesses to attract customers. By using AI technology, companies can improve their customer experience and engagement, ultimately leading to increased revenue and brand loyalty. As the business landscape continues to change at an accelerated rate, those companies that understand how AI works and how to use it properly will be able to achieve great levels of success in the future. It is no surprise then that business owners are taking full advantage of what AI has to offer today. Here are some ways your business should be using AI to attract customers right now.

The past weeks have seen escalating competition between Microsoft and Google over large language models--or more precisely put, Google trying hard to protect its search business against Microsoft and OpenAI's large language models. The two tech giants are in an intensifying tug of war over how we will access information in the future, matching research with research, product with product, and investment with investment. Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November, there has been a lot of speculation about the large language model's killer application(s). One of the topics brought up again and again is ChatGPT and other LLMs making Google Search obsolete. I'm still sticking to my previous argument that something like ChatGPT will replace Google Search.

ChatGPT has taken the tech world by storm in just a few short months. The viral success of the chatbot, made by OpenAI, has caused a huge ripple across the tech industry. Venture capitalists are betting big on startups that are getting in on the craze, even as Google moves quickly to address the threat that ChatGPT poses to its core search business. In 2022, investors put at least $1.37 billion into generative AI startups, usually at the seed stage. That's almost as much as what was invested in the market in the previous five years combined, according to PitchBook.

In this special guest feature, Ryan Welsh, Co-founder and CEO of Kyndi, discusses how organizations are leveraging the latest natural language processing techniques to enable sophisticated natural language understanding. Ryan started Kyndi in 2014 with a vision of creating a world where AI would empower humans to do their most meaningful work. Under his leadership, Kyndi has created the natural language enablement category, offering a powerful Natural Language Enablement Platform and natural language-enabled solutions. Ryan received his B.A. in Anthropology from The Catholic University of America, his M.S. in Applied Math/Economics from Rutgers University, and an M.B.A. from the University of Notre Dame. According to Deloitte, as much as 80% of all information is hidden in unstructured, text-based data living in various systems inside and outside of the companies.

Etsy is hiring a Senior Applied Scientist in the Retrieval Sciences team. We develop efficient, state-of-the-art, large-scale search models that sift through a universe of nearly a hundred million special, extraordinary items to help Etsy buyers find something they will love. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will set the scientific direction to improve the search experience of our buyers. Working hands-on with your collaborators, you will deliver robust production models that will be A/B tested live on Etsy.com! Does helping people find the perfect handmade or vintage good from using the latest ML research sound exciting to you?