Due to safety and reputational risks, Google has been slower than competitors to launch AI-powered products. But fierce competition from competitors Microsoft, OpenAI, and others has left it no selection but to begin, says Chirag Shah, a pc science professor on the University of Washington.

It’s a high-risk strategy, on condition that AI language models have quite a few flaws with no known fixes. Embedding them into its products could backfire and run afoul of increasingly hawkish regulators, experts warn.

Google can also be opening up access to its ChatGPT competitor, Bard, from a select group within the US and the UK to most people in over 180 countries. Bard will “soon” allow people to prompt it using images in addition to words, Google said, and the chatbot will have the option to answer to queries with pictures. Google can also be launching AI tools that permit people generate and debug code.

Google has been using AI technology for years in products like text translation and speech recognition. But that is the corporate’s biggest push yet to integrate the most recent wave of AI technology into quite a lot of products. 

“[AI language models’] capabilities are recovering. We’re finding increasingly places where we are able to integrate them into our existing products, and we’re also finding real opportunities to offer value to people in a daring but responsible way,” Zoubin Ghahramani, vp of Google DeepMind, told MIT Technology Review. 

“This moment for Google is actually a moment where we’re seeing the facility of putting AI in people’s hands,” he says.

The hope, Ghahramani says, is that folks will get so used to those tools that they’ll turn into an unremarkable a part of day-to-day life.  

One-stop shop

Google’s announcement comes as rivals like Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta and open-source groups like Stability.AI compete to launch impressive AI tools that may summarize text, fluently answer people’s queries, and even produce images and videos from word prompts.