Duet AI Signals Google’s Intent To Dominate AI
At Google Cloud Next '23, Google introduced a host of new AI features and services at the annual developers conference, strengthening itself as a dominant force in AI.
w/Artificial Intelligence
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Google’s Move To Dominate AI
Google is celebrating its 25th year in the tech industry, and it has come a long way since it was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998. Back then, it was only a search engine, and it lived for its first few months in the garage of Susan Wojcicki - the future boss of YouTube. With time, Google has diversified into pretty much every area of tech and dominates some of them.
However, Google is now trying to position itself at the forefront of advancing the frontier of artificial intelligence. Nonetheless, some people are of the opinion that Google has fallen behind in the AI race. A leaked memo from a Google engineer found its way onto the net, in which he said the firm had no AI "secret sauce" and was not in a position to win the race.
Despite this, Google announced 25 new AI-driven products at the IO developers conference in May and owns leading UK-based AI firm DeepMind, whose AI program AlphaFold has the potential to supercharge the discovery of new medications. In addition, Google has a not-so-secret AI weapon in its cloud business.
Cloud companies offer access to huge networks of computers and processing power that would be logistically difficult for most companies to own or house by themselves. It makes total sense that Google is positioning itself to be at the centre of the AI revolution with its Google Cloud business, given the huge demand from businesses large and small to update infrastructure and storage ready to whirr through huge generative AI workloads.
Google Cloud is the cloud computing division of Google. It’s a $35 billion business with a marketshare of around 10% of a global cloud computing sector dominated by Amazon Web Services. By comparison, AWS revenues in 2022 were $80 billion.
However, despite Amazon’s market leadership and over two times bigger business, Google has stolen a march on AWS when it comes to AI. Amazon have been slow, almost absent from the AI gold rush whilst Google has matched Microsoft when it comes to rolling out new AI features and services almost weekly.
“More than half of all funded gen AI startups are Google Cloud customers, including 70% of gen AI “unicorns,” or those valued at more than $1 billion,” Google Cloud
This dominance exposes Amazon’s weakness as a hardware focused business with a disjointed portfolio of service offerings, compared to Google’s integrated software and services approach.
The bottom line is that Google saw the AI gold rush coming ahead of time and moved quickly to re-platform their services to be AI driven, whereas Amazon have been caught navel gazing as they try and figure out how to AI enable a cloud business that wasn’t designed to be that way.
At Google Cloud’s annual show and tell last week, called Next ‘23, CEO Sundar Pichai and his leadership team unveiled a host of new AI features that will make AI accessible and integrated into the everyday person’s daily routine.
These awesome-looking new tools powered by AI are designed and built to improve personal productivity and make our digital lives easier. To top it off, Google also unveiled an incredibly powerful new AI processor chip to challenge NVIDIA that is supposedly the fastest in the world.
Here’s a breakdown of the key headlines from the Google Cloud conference.
Google’s Duet AI Redefines Office Productivity
Google's announcement of Duet AI has me fascinated, curious and wondering, “can it be?” Apparently, after “rigorous testing” with thousands of companies, Google’s new AI office assistant claims to have impressive new capabilities.
Several features of Duet AI stood out. Here’s how Google described it:
“Imagine you’re a financial analyst and you get an email at 5 PM from your boss asking for a presentation on Q3 performance by 8 AM tomorrow — we’ve all been there. Instead of scrambling through forecasts in Sheets, P&L Docs, Monthly Business Review Slides, and reading emails from the regional sales leads, you’ll soon be able to simply ask Duet AI to do the heavy lifting with a prompt like “create a summary of Q3 performance.” Duet AI can create a whole new presentation, complete with text, charts, and images, based on your relevant content in Drive and Gmail. A last-minute request that once called for an all-nighter, can now be completed before dinner time.”
Taking Minutes
Duet AI acts as a notes taking secretary, taking notes during a meeting then sending a recap to all the participants immediately the meet is over.
The "take notes for me" feature looks really slick. It captures notes, action items, and video clips in real time, then provides a summary record of the meeting. Duet AI can recap everything said, summarise key data points, clip key moments from the video recording and even auto-generate a presentation slide deck with charts explaining the data.
This integration across Google Workspace products is really powerful and made possible because they own the whole office ecosystem - Google Meets, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides.
This gives Google a massive competitive advantage over any third party software developer trying to create a similar office productivity capability.
Attend For Me
The wildest feature is "attend for me". Duet AI can literally join a meeting for you, deliver your message, then give you a recap of what happened. No more wasting time in pointless meetings or cancelling that afternoon round of golf because of a pesky meeting!
Duet AI also integrates with Google Meet. It can add your name to your video tile, auto-generate captions translated into 18 languages in real time, and enhance lighting and sound using AI.
Whilst this has the sound of a gimmicky feature, and I jest about the golf, the serious point here is that all too often, people attend a meeting because they have a valuable but small contribution to make. They don’t need to sit through the whole hour when they can be represented by their AI. Or sometimes, they’re needed in two meetings at the same time.
Duet’s new AI feature addresses these very real office dilemmas.
Improved Productivity
Duet AI’s capabilities extend beyond meetings. The artificial intelligence can generate presentations from text, charts, images, and content that’s stored in Google Drive or in your Gmail account.
For Google Chat users, Duet AI refreshes the interface with shortcuts, better search, and the ability to chat directly with the AI. Users can ask it to summarise documents, catch them up on conversations, and more.
Gmail gets smarter replies that are more personalised with just a tap. Google is also exploring using AI to create tailored content for Workspace by partnering with AI tools providers like Typeface and Jasper.
Privacy Concerns
There are valid privacy concerns however, given that Google has coordinated and informed access to business data (it’s one thing to hold data sets across a range of disparate products, it’s something else to have Google process them in unison and know what they all mean!)
But Google says all Duet AI interactions stay within the organisation and follow all existing security, safety and protection policies and guidelines. Whether an organisation is satisfied with that is another matter, but for small to medium sized enterprises, the productivity gains may well out weigh any perceived risk of giving too much insight about their business away.
Google also state that none of this user data is used to train their large language models.
Reinventing Search, Security And Safety Online
Google’s AI Search capability is called Search Generative Experience (SGE.) It’s a bit of a mouthful and all jargon, but it’s the feature which allows people to search by speaking instead of typing. It can also translate languages in real time.
Google announced that SGE is now available in India and Japan, letting users search Google in native languages like Hindi and Japanese.
They also announced a new feature called 'mentioned in.' What it means is that there’s now a section under each search result that shows the user the sites that Google used to get that information. In an age of fact checking and concerns over AI hallucinations, it’s a vital function to double check that the facts are accurate. This in itself is nothing new, Bing AI does this already, but given that 95% of all Search is on Google, it’s a significant new feature.
Another feature introduced at Next ‘23 is that Google is leveraging AI in a clever way to help businesses protect their online images from misuse. Through a tool called Synth ID, Google embeds imperceptible digital watermarks into AI-generated images. If someone later modifies the image, the watermark remains, allowing companies to track where their images are being distributed on the web.
You have no doubt seen images with a visible watermark running across the photo showing that it belongs to Getty. But there are also many protected images being reused that don’t have the visible watermark. With the proliferation of AI generated content, Google’s Synth ID is a means to incorporate a digital watermark, invisible to any human, that can not be removed. It’s a dull, but important issue for many.
Finally, Google has enhanced their SafeSearch filter that screens explicit or inappropriate content in Google Image searches. Thanks to advancements in AI, SafeSearch can better identify and blur potentially offensive images displaying nudity, violence, and other forms of inappropriate content.
Interestingly, in the same week that Google announced SafeSearch, Apple broke their silence over their reasons for withdrawing an iCloud service that would search for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on a user’s iCloud device. It’s a subject I covered in 2021 and, frankly, was surprised and saddened to see Apple back track under a barrage of criticism over invasions of privacy. So far, I’ve not seen the same hostile reaction aimed at Google’s attempts to improve detection of unsafe material.
Google’s Supremacy Requires AI Self-Sufficiency
Now, arguably Google's most monumental, albeit low-key, achievement recently is the announcement of their super fast AI computer chips.
Apologies in advance for the jargon, these are their fourth-generation tensor processing unit (TPU) chips designed specifically for AI tasks that are reported to be the fastest AI processor in the world, capable of a blazing one quintillion operations per second!
To put this into perspective, when I started working with computer mainframes in the 1980s, the measure of computer power was in the 10s of millions. A quintillion is a million millions!
Anyhow, the reason that this is important is that AI computer chips are dominated currently by NVIDIA and their super-powered AI chips. Nobody is a close second to NVIDIA’s capability and as a result, demand and cost for NVIDIA chips is sky high and a lead time for new ones is measured in many months.
Google’s ability to manufacture their own super fast AI chips is critical to their ability to be AI self-sufficient. It also helps them press Amazon’s dominance in cloud computing because Google has made these ultra-powerful TPUv4 chips available to the public through their Google Cloud platform. This grants anyone interested in AI access to truly cutting-edge processing power to help make their ambitions a reality.
Here’s The Thing:
Google is on a roll in what is essentially a two horse AI race between them and Microsoft. I’ve no doubt that Apple will enter the ring shortly. Meta has a lot more AI capability to come and Amazon will eventually get their act together.
But for now, Google has the momentum when it comes to making AI useful and accessible to a market that both needs it and can afford to pay for it…office workers.
With over 3 billion Google Workspace users and over 10 million paying customers, Duet AI should have a big impact on office and personal productivity. Google are providing a free trial for users to check it out, but we know that enterprise pricing is going to around $30 per user monthly. It will be interesting to see if it gets cheaper for smaller companies.
The bottom line based on the demo and presentations for all of these AI offerings is there are some seriously cool capabilities. I’m sure Sundar Pichai wouldn’t have opened the conference if the capability didn’t match the promise. What’s most interesting to me is the sense that Google is just getting started with AI. Having watched Microsoft take the early headlines with their tie up with OpenAI, Google, who have been the leaders in AI for the past decade, have kept their cool and are showing what they’ve got. There’s more to come, for sure!
Further Information
Google’s 25th Birthday Blog From Sundar Pichai.