Google CEO Sundar Pichai just revealed that more than a quarter of all new code at the company is generated by AI, which engineers then review and accept. The milestone highlights how deeply automated development has become inside the tech giant itself. Why it matters: Big tech isn't just selling AI coding tools to developers—they're letting AI build their own stack.
Google just officially named and released pre-trained weights for AlphaChip, its reinforcement learning system that treats chip floorplanning like a board game. The AI generates superhuman circuit layouts in hours instead of months, and has already designed Google's last three TPU generations as well as MediaTek chips. Why it matters: AI is no longer just running on advanced silicon—it is actively redesigning the hardware that powers it.
Google just appointed former Character.AI CEO Noam Shazeer as co-technical lead for Gemini, joining heavyweights Jeff Dean and Oriol Vinyals. Shazeer recently returned to Google following a massive $2.7 billion licensing and talent deal to turbocharge its fight against OpenAI.
Iyo just announced the Iyo One, a pair of standalone generative AI earbuds launching this winter. Spun out of Alphabet’s X lab, the startup is ditching awkward lapel pins to bet on an audio form factor people already wear daily. Why it matters: Unlike Humane or Rabbit, it still works as high-end headphones if the AI flops, though standalone cellular battery lasts only 90 minutes.
Google is reportedly shelling out $5 million to $6 million a year to News Corp to develop AI-related content and products. While tech giants scramble to secure media partnerships to feed their models, News Corp quickly pushed back, stating it has absolutely no AI licensing deal in place with Google.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security just formed a 22-member AI Safety and Security Board, tapping tech leaders like Sam Altman, Satya Nadella, and Sundar Pichai. The panel is tasked with shielding critical infrastructure like power grids and airports from AI-driven threats. Why it matters: As risks range from automated cyberattacks to bioweapons, Washington is asking the builders of AI to help safeguard the nation against it.
Alphabet’s X lab just teamed up with the U.S. National Guard to speed up emergency response with AI. Built by its Bellwether team, the system analyzes aerial photos of disaster zones in seconds to pinpoint damaged critical infrastructure, replacing a slow manual triage process ahead of this June's wildfire season.
Google just announced its next-gen AI model Gemini 1.5, led by 1.5 Pro built on a Mixture-of-Experts architecture. It matches flagship 1.0 Ultra quality with far less compute while shattering context limits with support for up to 1 million tokens—enough for an hour of video or 30,000 lines of code. It's rolling out now in limited preview for developers and enterprise users.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has stepped back into the trenches, working three to four days a week at the Mountain View office on the upcoming Gemini model. Google is building the multimodal AI to counter OpenAI's ChatGPT4, aiming for a rollout by the end of the year. CEO Sundar Pichai is reportedly enthusiastic about his hands-on return.
Llion Jones, the last remaining author of the groundbreaking 2017 Transformer paper 'Attention is All You Need', just confirmed he is leaving Google to start his own company. All eight researchers behind the architecture powering ChatGPT and Midjourney have departed, launching startups like Cohere and Character.ai now valued at over $4.1 billion combined.
Google is reportedly planning to launch its latest large language model, PaLM 2, at its developer conference this week. Internal documents show the model supports over 100 languages with advanced coding and math skills, alongside new generative experiences rolling out to Bard, Search, and Workspace. Why it matters: Google is ramping up its defense against Microsoft and OpenAI by aggressively injecting generative AI across its flagship products.
Google just consolidated its two powerhouse research units, DeepMind and Google Brain, into a single division called Google DeepMind led by Demis Hassabis. Jeff Dean will take on the role of chief scientist across both groups. It is Google's biggest organizational shakeup yet to pool talent and compute in the race against OpenAI.
YouTube’s new boss Neal Mohan just announced that generative AI features are coming to the platform in the coming months. Creators will soon be able to virtually swap outfits and build fantastical video backgrounds with generative tools. It shows YouTube is ready to integrate generative AI directly into creator workflows while building guardrails.
Google just suffered an embarrassing debut with its new AI chatbot Bard after astronomers caught a factual blunder in its official promo GIF. The bot claimed the James Webb Space Telescope snapped the first-ever exoplanet photos—a milestone actually achieved in 2004. Alphabet shares tumbled as the mistake laid bare the persistent hallucination problem in LLMs.
Google is bringing conversational AI straight to its search engine very soon, CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Thursday's earnings call. Users will soon interact directly with its LaMDA language model in Search, alongside internal tests for chatbot Apprentice Bard. With ad revenue dipping and Microsoft backing OpenAI, Google is also consolidating DeepMind into its core business to accelerate AI deployment.
Google parent Alphabet is closing DeepMind's Edmonton research hub and cutting operational staff in the UK amid broader restructuring. Impacted researchers and engineers can relocate to other offices, but back-office roles face layoffs, marking the closure of DeepMind's only office not hosted inside a Google workspace.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai just sounded a "Code Red" over ChatGPT, bringing back co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to review its AI roadmap. After stepping away in 2019, the duo held high-level meetings to plan integrating advanced AI features directly into Google search to defend its market dominance.
Google parent Alphabet just included its prized artificial intelligence and research teams in a massive 12,000-person layoff. An internal memo from AI lead Jeff Dean reveals modest cuts to research, a pullback on its clinician data platform, and robot unit consolidations. Why it matters: Even as competition from ChatGPT heats up, slowing ad growth is forcing Google to trim the very teams driving its future.
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis is urging caution in the race toward AGI, directly pushing back against Facebook's famous mantra to 'move fast and break things.' With emerging risks spanning dangerous chemicals and rogue cyberattacks, Hassabis warns that developers cannot afford to deploy first and clean up the damage later.
Google is facing intense heat from ChatGPT, with reports confirming it launched a "Code Red operation" to accelerate rival AI launches by mid-2023. While Google possesses its own conversational engine LaMDA, rolling it out threatens its ad-driven search model, which accounted for 81% of its FY2021 revenue.
