During a live event on Wednesday, Google demonstrated the latest AI upgrades to its search engine, Maps, and more.
A Google executive briefly showed off the tech giant's recently unveiled Bard chatbot. In one demo, he showed how Bard could generate a response about the pros and cons of buying an EV.
- Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan, who led the demo, showed how Google's generative AI technology could summarize web information in searches.
- He noted that the AI's responses are meant to help organize complex information and deliver multiple viewpoints.
- Its responses are considered to be "NORA" or "no one right answer," according to Raghavan.
- Besides the demo, Google did not offer much new information about Bard, its conversational AI bot that's a competitor to ChatGPT.
- Google is now group testing Bard, which is expected to be released publicly in several weeks.
- Also on Wednesday, it was reported that Google's Bard made an error, which may have caused company shares to close down 7% today.
- In the online demo earlier this week, a user asked Bard, "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?"
- In one of its responses, Bard claimed the Telescope "took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system."
- As noted by astronomers, the first image of an exoplanet was actually taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in 2004.
- During Wednesday's event, the tech giant unveiled other AI features in its products.
- It showed how its "Immersive View" tool in Google Maps uses AI to combine aerial and street images to generate digital 3D models of areas. As of today, Immersive View is available to users in London, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo.
- Google also announced that an AI-powered multisearch feature is coming to mobile device users globally. Available for Google Lens users, it lets people search using both images and text.
