Kathy Gibson reports – Artificial intelligence (AI) looms large in Google’s product strategy. And it’s no longer a future technology, but something that is being delivered right now.
That’s the word from Yvette Baez, director of business strategies at Google, who encourages uses to try out the possibilities of AI for themselves.
Part of AI’s appeal is the multi-faceted experience that goes beyond simply text or images. “We are introducing a new acronym to describe the Gemini experience – WINS, which stands for words, images, numbers and sounds,” Baez says.
They’ll find that using a technology like Google’s Gemini is not so different from the search engines people are accustomed to.
“The rules of prompting are the same – just make sure you give it context,” she says. “But the richness of AI and Gemini specifically is very different from what we had before.”
She describes the difference as such: “Search is what we know; AI is what we don’t know that we don’t know.”
Because AI systems like Gemini are built on natural intelligence, users can have a natural conversation with it, and it will go so far as to context. And, of course, AI has the ability to respond in many different media, she adds.
Baez says the goal of AI systems is to be inspirational for users, but also to help people to tackle real-world issues.
“For instance, we have been using AI to forecast natural disasters. And it does a big job in healthcare: AI has been used by pharmaceutical companies to identify new drugs, new molecules that accelerate the development of new drugs; getting people into trials and more.
“In the early days of Covid-19, becauser we had access to large sets of data, we could help ensure the vaccine got to areas before their infections spiked.”