Google Launched Pixel 8: A Parade of Artificial Intelligence, and What Have We Learned About It During Its First Launch?

As early as 2019, AI was already being used as a buzzword to sell everything from toothbrushes to TVs. But Google’s recent presentations have seen the company aggressively position itself as a leader in the AI space. Critics suggested it had been caught off guard by the overnight success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the speed with which competitor Microsoft had integrated the new technology into its products. But in its eagerness to respond, Google risks emphasizing the AI-ness of it all at the expense of the useful features that its customers will actually use.

Osterloh inadvertently demonstrated this when he mentioned the original 2016 Pixel launch, and how much emphasis was given to artificial Intelligence back then. At the first launch of thePixel, I see a few individuals who were at the first launch seven years ago and they explained thatPixel is designed to bring together hardware and software with artificial intelligence at the center.

I think it is not the whole story when you say the phrase on average more than once a minute during a phone launch, but if your competitor doesn’t say it at all.

For the most part, I don’t think this is a huge problem. Who cares how the Pixel Watch 2’s heart rate algorithm works so long as it’s accurate? And ultimately, the results of the Pixel 8’s photography pipeline will have to speak for itself, regardless of how much “AI” was involved along the way.

Source: Google’s Pixel 8 launch was a parade of AI

The Power of Generative AI: How Google is throwing a hammer at a wall, and why they don’t want to do that

It makes sense because it is a tech demo. One of the great strengths of generative software is its ability to write in certain styles (particularly one which is laden with cliches as social media image caption).

Ignore the AI part, and think of this as a feature on the phone. How are we at a point in our lives where it’s convenient for a phone to draft our social media posts for us? What is the point? If you are asking a machine to draft an image caption for a photo, why don’t you just publish it? What are we doing?

I have a theory, and it’s that — in the absence of a killer app for generative AI — Google is throwing features at a wall and seeing what sticks. The search giant has a hammer that is called generative Artificial Intelligence, and its search for nails is taking it to weird places. We need to look at the messy implications of building generative AI directly into the photo service.

If anything, it seems to reflect an anxiety at Google to avoid being seen as left behind in the maelstrom of AI hype. When Microsoft announced it would be integrating generativeai into Bing, CEO Satya Nadella made it clear that they were taking a shot at the other side. With our innovations, I hope they will want to show that they can dance. “And I want people to know that we made them dance.” Since then, there has been an enthusiastic tap-dance through all of the presentations.

Graphcore faces financial uncertainty after the UK government announcement of an Exascale Supercomputer for Artificial Intelligence (Isambard Kingdom Brunel)

Last month, the UK government announced the home for its new exascale supercomputer, designed to give the country an edge in the global artificial intelligence race. Bristol, a city famed for its industrial heritage, will be home to the machine that will be named after the local engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

But that deal hasn’t come through, and the company has struggled to turn early hype around its products into sales. This week, Graphcore filed accounts showing that it urgently needs to raise new funding. If it can’t do so by May next year, the company faces “material uncertainty” over whether it can remain a going concern, as losses mount.

Founded in 2016 by Toon and Simon Knowles after the pair sold their previous hardware company to Nvidia, Graphcore has spent the last few years promising to build the next generation of chips. Graphics processing units, which are the standard for computer-aided artificial intelligence applications, have been replaced by intelligence processing units. Graphcore claims its IPUs are better suited to the specific requirements of AI than GPUs, which are multipurpose chips originally designed for image processing. Early investors included Microsoft—now one of the giants in the vanguard of AI, and a big backer of OpenAI, developer of the ChatGPT chatbot. In 2020, Microsoft stopped using Graphcore’s chips.

Graphcore’s technology may have been different than what users are used to, and that may have been the reason it struggled. He says that Graphcore is not able to take the researchers and engineers from the mainstream to their own way of doing things.