This Week in AI
The big happenings in the world of AI this week were dominated by Google’s I/O conference. It’s a sign of the changing times that a Google conference would announce a lot of AI services. I think the launch of ChatGPT has certainly shaken up the landscape and forced companies like Google to accelerate their plans. Here are some that caught my eye:
Google announces its next-generation Large Language Model, PaLM 2. Sadly I’m old enough to remember the Palm devices, so it does seem a little retro to me. It os said to be a new general-purpose large language model that can generate a wide variety of human-like text in response to human input. The model is skilled at math, software development, language translation reasoning and natural language generation.
Google is bringing Generative A.I. directly to Search.
Not surprisingly and widely predicted, Google is bringing Generative AI features to search called “Search Generative Experience,” or SGE. It’ll be able to synthesize search results from complex queries.
It’ll be available to Labs users over the “coming weeks,” and users can access it by tapping on the Labs icon in the Google app or on the desktop version of Google Chrome. However, it’s not clear when it will be available to everyone.
Google removes waiting list for Bard chatbot.
Google is upgrading its Bard artificial intelligence chatbot, making it more widely available and giving it a variety of new capabilities.
In March, Google started letting users in the U.S. and the U.K. test Bard, a rival to ChatGPT, the viral chatbot that Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI released in November. Now Google is opening access to the broader public, releasing it in over 180 countries and territories.
Wendy’s will open a new AI-powered drive-thru in Columbus, Ohio, in June. You knew it would happen and I’ve also heard of some automated McDonalds restaurants. Wendy’s FreshAI will be powered by Google’s AI chatbot service. The chatbot will use voice recognition to take orders from customers. A human employee will monitor the service to ensure that it is working correctly. Customers will have the option to speak with a human if needed. Wendy’s is not planning to replace existing workers with the technology.
Google launches a GitHub Copilot competitor. Google has launched an integrated chat tool for coders. Codey was designed specifically to handle queries related to coding and also to Google Cloud general queries. It will be available for Google’s cloud-hosted Workstations service, Visual Studio Code, the Google Shell Editor, and JetBrains’ IDEs. Codey is currently only available to a few trusted testers.
Developers increasingly get advice from AI chatbots and GitHub CoPilot rather than Stack Overflow message boards. It seems these chat tools for coders are pretty effective as they are driving down traffic to the traditional resource for answers to all questions on coding.Interesting Projects
Interesting Projects
Here’s a couple I came across this week.
TinyML Made Easy: Image Classification. I love this project from Marcelo of MJRobot and documented on Hackster where he takes the incredibly low-priced Seeed Xiao ESP32S3 Sense, which for $13.99 includes a 240MHz processor, camera & microphone, among other things and walks you through an image classifier for bananas, apples & potatoes using TinyML.
TinyML: An Always-On Audio Classifier using Synthetic Data. This is another Audio project using Synthetic data to train an Audio monitor based on the Arduino Nicla Voice. It’s very similar to the one I shared recently for Baby Cry detection and uses a similar workflow and tools. I’m intrigued by the whole concept of using synthetic data to train the AI.