What You May Have Missed #27
Google I/O (PaLM 2, Bard, Search, Gemini) / Creatives in check (Brian Merchant, Grimes, AI movies) / Essays (Best: Dylan Patel) / R&D (100K context LMs, LMs to explain LMs) / Misc (Gary Marcus TED)
Google I/O
In case you didn't watch the keynote, here's a 10-minute summary uploaded by Google on YouTube.
PaLM 2 is out. Google says the largest version is even above GPT-4 level at text generation. The smallest can run on-device offline and is already above PaLM on many tasks; good news for those who bet on smaller models. Here’s the 91-page PaLM 2 technical report (don’t look for technical specs about the architecture, size, or dataset, because Google, following OpenAI’s example, hasn’t released them).
Bard, Google’s ChatGPT rival, is now running on PaLM 2 (not LaMDA) and can now take images as inputs to generate captions, the waitlist is removed and is available in 180 countries (interestingly, EU countries are excluded from the list possibly due to GDPR).
Google is following Microsoft’s steps with search (with the small difference that there are people who actually use Google Search). After a query is submitted, a generative AI snapshot will appear above everything else with relevant information. If you click to ask another question, it'll take you to the conversational mode. (Only available through a waitlist for the US.)
Codey: Based on PaLM 2, it’s a GitHub Copilot competitor.
Duet AI: Generative AI in Workspace; Docs and Gmail.
MusicML is now public on AI Test Kitchen.
Project Tailwind: “Tailwind is your AI-first notebook, grounded in the information you choose and trust. Tailwind is an experiment, and currently available in the U.S. only.”
Gemini: Demis Hassabis says it’s “the new Google DeepMind foundation model in training that will have impressive multimodal capabilities not seen in prior models.” (Google Brain and DeepMind have recently fused into Google DeepMind, now led by Hassabis, presumably to combat Microsoft/OpenAI.)
The Verge edited this funny clip with the caption: “Pretty sure Google is focusing on AI at this year’s I/O.” They’re clearly making it up for lost time.