Google I/O Event

Google are going to win the AI race over OpenAI, eventually. Here is why.

1. They have deep pockets, it’s a business that is already floated, has large reserves of cash, generates cash, has a vast employee base.

2. They have a vast customer base, ‘Google It’ is a thing. They have android, they have embedded android. They don’t need to persuade people they are a trustworthy company with good products

3. They have unfathomably large amounts of data, every search, every web page index, every email, every google chat, the entire of Youtube (including the video content which has transcripts, tagging, reviews, social weight graphs)

4. They have decades deep AI technology, the seminal research for today’s LLM was Google, they have google Deepmind. This profound depth of work pushes the directions of the fundamental AI underlying everything they do, this mixture of models is a potent set

5. They have a well established cloud business, infrastructure and developer tools.

So if they have all this why are they not winning? For all of the above, Google is great at being ‘tech clever’, its still not great at being ‘consumer clever’. If you compare Google I/O vs the openAI announcements last week. OpenAI is getting all the press, but behind the scenes, was there anything that Google Astra couldn’t have done, had the demo been run that way?

We don’t know, neither product is in the wild, they are both ‘soon’. When they arrive then we can make a judgement. I suspect Google Astra will win out. Watch for the clip section ‘find my glasses’. Think of this in conjunction with for examples, deteriorating memory loss..

Changing the way search works

AI is already sitting behind google search. Changing the most used web based UI (the google search experience) is not something that will be rushed. They are facing three problems.

1. The adwords economy, which is how they make their revenue. Risking this is definitely a problem

2. The vast majority of users like the simple white page, and the results. Slowly over time the results have become richer and more nuanced (and commercially influenced by advertising)

3. It has to be better, search is already great…

This is the full google I/O Keynote, it has timestamps, Search is 38 minutes in…

The change over to the new experience is going to be slow, and heavily tested. This is going to impact everything digital marketing. Googles advice on how to future proof your digital marketing is, relevance and usefulness. It certainly won’t help to have your data to be in good order, multilingual, and well meta tagged.

Google I/O announcements summary

here is a categorised table of the 100 announcements made at Google I/O 2024, grouped into seven broad categories: