This morning, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai inaugurated a latest hub in Paris dedicated to artificial intelligence. This hub is situated in a newly renovated constructing near Google’s important office in Paris. It’ll host around 300 researchers and engineers.

But in the event you pay close attention to Google’s whereabouts in Paris, you could think that Google already launched an AI research center in Paris back in 2018. In actual fact, the corporate told me that it doesn’t plan to create a latest AI team for this latest hub. There’s some latest office space, however the team of 300 researchers and engineers who’re going to work from the brand new hub were already working for Google Research and DeepMind — in addition to YouTube and Chrome.

And yet, several high-profile government members, comparable to Bruno Le Maire (the minister of the economy) and Valérie Pécresse (the president of the Île-de-France region) were there to welcome Sundar Pichai and congratulate Google on the announcement.

Given the involvement of Google’s top leader and government members, let’s dissect this communication effort. With the positioning of this announcement, Google desires to remain near the highest of the list in terms of attracting AI talent.

Google could have sent an email to its employees to inform them after they can pick up their badges for the brand new office. As an alternative, the corporate decided that it was a PR opportunity. The corporate needs to point out that it cares about AI and that it’s a priority.

And there’s a reason why Google thinks it could actually attract AI talent in Paris. Over the past few years, several tech giants have arrange AI research labs there. Along with Google, Facebook (now Meta) created its Paris research lab back in 2015 with Yann LeCun on the helm of the AI initiative — this research group is named FAIR, for Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research.

Since then, many researchers and engineers left their jobs at Big Tech firms to create startups. Mistral AI is arguably essentially the most emblematic example of that because the young startup has already raised a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of dollars to develop latest foundational models.

But there’s a thriving ecosystem of AI startups in Paris. Examples include Nabla, Dust, Gladia and Giskard. In only a couple of years, a few of the people working for these startups could also decide to work for Google in the event that they’re on the lookout for something a bit different.

All the things is AI now

At the identical time, it shows once more that Google is insecure about artificial intelligence. Provided that this constructing will host teams working not only on AI research projects but additionally on consumer products like YouTube and Chrome, Google could have simply called it a “Google hub.”

But the corporate decided that this was an AI hub. They need to say loud and clear that they’re an AI company. Sure, the tech giant just launched Gemini Ultra, its strongest large language model up to now. But most individuals still take into consideration ChatGPT when they give thought to an AI assistant.

A yr ago at a press conference in Paris, Google unveiled Bard, its AI chatbot assistant that’s now called Gemini. It was a rushed effort to meet up with ChatGPT.

But it surely was as much about launching a product because it was about planting a flag that shows that the corporate is able to releasing an LLM-based chatbot — after which iterate. You can consider that today’s latest AI hub is the continuation of that strategy of standard announcements about AI.

Image Credits: Eric Laignel / Studios Architecture for Google

To be fair, Google isn’t the one tech giant making grand gestures about AI investments. Along with its financial commitment in ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI, Microsoft also announced today a €3.2 billion ($3.4 billion) investment over the subsequent two years in AI infrastructure in Germany.

Once more, this investment isn’t focused on artificial intelligence exclusively. Microsoft plans to create data centers in Germany for its Azure cloud platform. A few of Azure’s products are focused on AI, nevertheless it’s a much larger cloud provider with clients that don’t have anything to do with the AI industry. So it’s not only a Google thing.