Alphabet unveils beefed-up AI chatbot as competition heats up

At its annual I/O developer event in Mountain View, California, CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is rolling out AI Overviews to all users in the U.S. this week after a long period of public testing since last year. The new AI features unveiled on Tuesday will help investors evaluate Alphabet's progress as it races against Microsoft , OpenAI and other competitors to dominate the emerging technology.

Google parent Alphabet on Tuesday showed how it is building on artificial intelligence across its businesses, including a beefed-up Gemini chatbot and improvements to search, as it faces growing competition from OpenAI and other rivals. At its annual I/O developer event in Mountain View, California, CEO Sundar Pichai said the company is rolling out AI Overviews to all users in the U.S. this week after a long period of public testing since last year.

The new AI features unveiled on Tuesday will help investors evaluate Alphabet's progress as it races against Microsoft , OpenAI and other competitors to dominate the emerging technology. Shares of Alphabet climbed during the product presentation and were last up about 1% at $172.50 on Tuesday afternoon.

"We are in the very early days of AI platforms," Pichai said. Google announced improvements to its Gemini Pro 1.5 model that is capable of making sense of a massive amount of data. On Tuesday, Google said it was doubling that amount, to 2 million tokens, meaning the AI potentially could answer questions when given thousands of pages of text or more than an hour of video to ingest.

The Pro model - starting with prompt sizes of up to 1 million tokens, or pieces of data - will also be available to subscribers to Google’s Gemini Advanced service. In another sign of fierce competition between OpenAI and Google, the online search leader teased Veo, an AI model that it claims to be its most powerful yet for creating videos on a simple text command.

Google had released an earlier video-generation technology in January, only to be upstaged weeks later by OpenAI’s Sora. The ChatGPT maker has promoted its film-conjuring software among Hollywood executives, enthralling and worrying the creative industry. Google said that filmmaker Donald Glover has experimented with its AI. The company also previewed a new text-to-image model, Imagen 3, and it touted other artist collaborations.

The company announced a scaled-down version of Gemini called 1.5 Flash, which aims to lower the cost of deploying AI and speed up responses. Like the more capable version, Flash can take in large amounts of data while being optimized for chat applications, video and image captioning. AI Overviews uses generative AI to synthesize information and answer more complex queries for which there is no simple answer on the Web.

Alphabet’s AI unit, Google DeepMind, has worked to build technology that can carry out day-to-day tasks for consumers. Early results have manifested in Project Astra, a tool that can use a smartphone camera and draw conclusions about the world around it. In a demo video shown during Google I/O, a user deployed it to identify a speaker and locate glasses they had left in another part of the room.

Microsoft-backed OpenAI on Monday showcased a new AI model called GPT-4o, which enables ChatGPT to respond via voice in real time and be interrupted - both hallmarks of realistic voice conversations that AI voice assistants like Google Assistant have found challenging.

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