Google Goes All Out on AI at I/O Conference

Google’s AI assistant, Gemini, has beaten “Pokémon Blue,” the 1996 GameBoy game. That’s the announcement CEO Sundar Pichai kicked off Google’s annual I/O conference with yesterday. (Playing retro Pokémon games is becoming a bragging point for AI companies — Anthropic shared its AI model Claude’s progress playing “Pokémon Red” in February.)

Gemini’s super-effective gameplay was the first of many AI announcements at the conference. Google’s AI onslaught comes as Big Tech races to catch up with up-and-comers (ahem, OpenAI) threatening tech leaders’ long-held dominance. 

Search Starts Multi-Tasking

Google wants to become the go-to AI platform as competitors encroach on its main biz: finding answers to questions like how to make Dubai chocolate strawberries. For years, Google held around a 90% share of the search market, but its dominance has slipped since ChatGPT came on the scene. A Bernstein analyst this month estimated it could already be as low as 65%, while Wells Fargo analysts said it could fall to 50% in five years. 

AI startups aren’t just cutting into Google’s search dominance with simple queries. They’ve also expanded the industry to AI-automated tasks — like writing essays or coming up with recipes based on a picture of what’s in the fridge. 

Big Tech’s trying to keep up:

• At its I/O conference, Google said that Gemini can generate replies across Google apps like Gmail and help users hunt for the right apartment. Gemini also got a new sibling: a coding agent named Jules. 
• Microsoft, the company behind No. 2 search engine Bing, announced more than 50 AI tools for building “the agentic web,” aka AI systems that automate tasks, during its annual Build conference yesterday. 

Not Feeling Lucky: While Google faces true competition for the first time from AI-focused competitors, it’s simultaneously being taken down by regulators for being a monopoly (ironic timing). US judges have ruled in two separate cases that it has an illegal monopoly both in the ad-tech world and on the search market. OpenAI introduced ChatGPT at a time when critics were already complaining about Google’s search product becoming less useful. Now, the tech leader is forced to innovate fast as it awaits rulings on how its monopolies might be broken up.