Sundar Pichai lays out Google’s AI roadmap in the ‘Gemini Era’

Google’s I/O Developer Conference was all about the AI roadmap for the tech giant. Speaking at the conference, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, started out by stating that Google is fully in its “Gemini Era”. A year ago on the I/O stage, Google had first shared its plans for Gemini: a frontier model built to be natively multimodal from the beginning that could reason across text, images, video, code, and more. It marks a big step in turning any input into any output - an “I/O” for a new generation.

He went on to add, “Since then, we introduced the first Gemini models, our most capable yet.” “Today, all of our 2-billion user products use Gemini,” he added.

He further said, “We’ve been investing in AI for more than a decade – and innovating at every layer of the stack: research, product, infrastructure... Still, we are in the early days of the AI platform shift. We see so much opportunity ahead, for creators, for developers, for startups, for everyone. Helping to drive those opportunities is what our Gemini era is all about.”

Expanding AI Overviews in Search

Pichai shared that one of the most exciting transformations with Gemini has been in Google Search. He said, “In the past year, we’ve answered billions of queries as part of our Search Generative Experience. People are using it to Search in entirely new ways, and asking new types of questions, longer and more complex queries, even searching with photos, and getting back the best the web has to offer.”

This Experience is also being tested outside of Labs, and the findingshave been encouraging, with increase being registered not just in Search usage, but also an increase in user satisfaction.

“I’m excited to announce that we’ll begin launching this fully-revamped experience, AI Overviews, to everyone in the US this week. And we’ll bring it to more countries soon,” Pichai announced, while highlighting the innovation happening in Search. “Thanks to Gemini, we can create much more powerful search experiences, including within our products,” he added.