ExoBrain
enterprise AImodel releasessearch and browsers

The Gemini era

Google’s I/O conference highlights its strategic pivot to the Gemini model family, showcasing new multimodal capabilities and search integrations while facing delays in full deployment.

Joel Miller

Joel Miller

3 min read
The Gemini era

On Tuesday at Google’s annual developer conference, I/O, the company announced the “era of Gemini” and numerous new products and AI integrations across their platforms. Google also showcased the evolution of search, with AI summaries, and a move from retrieval to action, with Gemini orchestrating complex multi-step tasks from the search box. Despite the impressive demos, Google appeared to be playing catch-up to its competitors, with many features scheduled for release later in the year or even in 2025. Here’s a rundown of the key announcements and their current status:

  • AI summarised search results (SGE): Rolling out in the US next week, and the rest of the world soon.
  • Action based search agents: Multi-step actions from the search box. No timeline on release.
  • Gemini 1.5 Pro: 2 million tokens expanded input capacity. Only available to select partners.
  • Gemini Flash: Faster, cheaper 1 million token model. Available now in preview.
  • Gemma updates: Larger 27 billion parameter open-weight model a few weeks out (which should compete with Llama 3 70 billion).
  • Gemini for Workspace (Docs, Sheets and Slides etc): Sidebar with generative features. Available later in the year.
  • AI Teammate in Gemini for Workspace: Co-worker agent with their own user identity. Not available until 2025.
  • Veo 1080p video generation, impressive but not state of the art. Only available to a very select few right-now. No timeline on release.
  • Imagen 3 text-to-image: Again, impressive but not state of the art and only available via a waitlist.
  • MusicFX audio tools: Slick celebrity videos, but only available to a very select few right-now. No timeline on release.
  • SynthID: Watermarking technology, will be complementary to C2PA. Can be used now in Imagen 2+.
  • Project Astra: Live world interaction ‘universal agent’ tech, and glasses with augmented reality: Very early demo. No timeline on release.
  • Scam detection during calls: Gemini Nano-powered feature to alert users of potential scams in real-time. No timeline on release.
  • Ask Photos: Natural language search for Google Photos using Gemini AI. Rolling out later this summer.
  • Gemini in Gmail: AI-assisted email searching, summarizing, drafting, and complex task handling. No timeline on release.
  • New Gemini on Android: AI-powered assistant with deep integration into Android and Google apps. No timeline on release.

Takeaways: The many delays aside, the intent was clear, Google are now fully focused on AI and regaining domination in this space. Their new orientation around the Gemini family and huge research investment with the likes of AlphaFold, will eventually pay dividends. This has been contrasted with Microsoft, who now seem to be hedging their bets with multiple in-house model developments alongside their partnership with OpenAI. Google remain wedded to the search paradigm, and their stock has taken some hits, but if they can pull off the delivery of complex planning features through the simplest of interfaces, they could be on to a winner. As per the emails released as a result of the Musk court case against OpenAI, it is ironic that OpenAI was clearly setup to offset Google’s then dominance of AI (and Microsoft themselves invested because they realised, they were way behind Google). Now the competition is instilling Google with newfound resolve.