The remote duel is relaunched between Google and Microsoft around generative artificial intelligence, this AI symbolized by ChatGPT – in which Microsoft has invested heavily. On May 10, at the opening of its Google I/O 2023 conference, the Mountain View giant presented its response to Microsoft by playing the innovation and responsibility card.
Artificial intelligence at the service of spectacular results: this is one of the strategies that Google demonstrated at the opening of its “Google I/O 2023” conference in California, on May 10, to make an impression. Example with this novelty called “Magic Editor” coming in Google Photos.
The demonstration is based on the photo of a child sitting on a bench, on the roof of a building, against a backdrop of skyscrapers and blue sky. The little girl is holding about fifteen multicolored balloons by a string: balloons that come out of the frame, and whose left side is therefore cut. In an instant, the artificial intelligence crops the photo, centers the little girl and the bench, and above all invents, reconstructs all the missing part of the image on the left: the balloons, the bench, the background and the whole top of the image, sky included, before a last detail: the adjustment of light and shadows.
BARD 2 not yet available in France
Another “wow” effect: the new immersive view of the route in Google Maps. The app shows you where you’re going, via the equivalent of a drone flyover, which changes direction where you need to turn. Very practical for finding your way, and getting a clear idea, before starting to ride.
On the text side, there is now also the equivalent of ChatGPT at Google. His name is Bard. In early February 2023, the day of its announcement, BARD had made a gross error, live, in answering a question about the James Webb Telescope. The action of the parent company of Google, Alphabet, had lost nearly 10% during the day, or 100 billion dollars in market capitalization.
So here is the V2 of BARD. No more waiting list that restricted access: generative AI is now available in 180 countries: yes but not in France. Anyway, not yet. BARD currently only understands English, Japanese and Korean, but 37 other languages are being integrated. Opposite, ChatGPT already chats in 10 languages including French, Arabic and Chinese.
25 AI-powered Google tools
In the coming months, BARD will integrate more than 25 Google tools: Google search of course – with the hope of stopping the growing popularity of Bing which Microsoft has already boosted chatGPT – Gmail to answer and write messages for you; Workspace, the office suite in the Cloud, with Google Docs and Google Sheets in particular. It is the equivalent of 365 Copilot, announced by Microsoft two months ago. And so, yes, Google is catching up but from there to regain the advantage, it will be necessary to compare.
Google which insists on its responsibility, as Microsoft had done. Responsibility of Google with respect to the reliability of the answers provided by its search engine, and by BARD. And responsibility with regard to indexed images, and the risks of misinformation linked to images created from scratch via an AI: they will soon be clearly identified in Google Search by the tag “IA“ (or “AI“ in English).
Google also promises two new image verification tools in a few weeks. They will be based in particular on a watermark – computer marking which the company hopes will resist attempts to remove it – and on metadata (information contained in the file), to trace the history of an image and identify those that have been manipulated.