Google Live in Paris: The Devil's In The Detail

At Google's AI 'Live from Paris' event, the tech giant showed off its AI/ML-powered Search and Maps updates. "Search is our biggest moonshot," said Prabhakar Raghavan, senior VP at Google, where he is responsible for Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments products. He started the event by acknowledging the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria and announced onboarding developers for additional work on Generative AI next month.  

The company published an Ad in the highly anticipated AI chatbot Bard, which unsurprisingly delivered an incorrect answer. A GIF of Bard in action calling the chatbot a "launchpad for curiosity" to simplify complex topics was posted on its Twitter account. In the GIF, Bard is given the prompt: "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year-old about?"

Bard inaccurately responded with several options, including one suggesting the JWST was used for the first photos of exoplanets (planets outside the Earth's solar system). However, the first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004 by the European Southern Observatory, as per NASA.

Marzia Niccoli also addressed the audience about Google Arts & Culture (She brought out the Blobs!), and Liz Reid, VP of Engineering, demoed some Lens capabilities, including the multi Search, which will let you search for variations of colour for products. It's now officially live on mobile globally. "We are reinventing what it means to search," said Raghavan in conclusion. We already got the Bard announcement two days ago, so the event seemed like a recap.