Google I/O 2024,revamps Gemini 1.5 Pro, rolls out AI Overviews in US

Google chief executive officer (CEO) Sundar Pichai on Tuesday made several big announcements with focus on artificial intelligence at the search engine giant's I/O developers event in California. Pichai said that the Google is unveiling AI Overviews to all the users in the United States this week.He also announced improvements to the Gemini Pro 1.5 model, that is capable of making sense of a massive amount of data.Pichai announced that the company has doubled the amount to 2 million tokens, meaning the AI potentially could answer questions when given thousands of pages of text or more than an hour of video to ingest in a single prompt.
The Pro model - starting with prompt sizes of up to 1 million tokens, or pieces of data - will also be available to subscribers to Google’s Gemini Advanced service.AI Overviews uses generative AI to synthesize information and answer more complex queries for which there is no simple answer on the Web.Google also announced a new Gemini model called 1.5 Flash, which is a lighter weight model as compared to 1.5 Pro. According to the company, it is optimized for tasks where low latency and cost matter - like chat applications, extracting data from long documents and more.
Google's announcements come a day after Microsoft-backed OpenAI unveiled its new AI model named GPT-4o, which enables the flagship ChatGPT to respond via voice in real time and be interrupted - both hallmarks of realistic voice conversations that AI voice assistants like Google Assistant have found challenging.The company also announced ‘Project Astra’, its new initiative focused on building a future AI assistant that can be truly helpful in everyday life.