Artificial Intelligence was all the rage in 2022. AI-generated art apps like Lensa, text generators like Article Forge, and even chatbots like ChatGPT, made big splashes in the tech world last year. And they got Google’s attention and refocused its commitment to AI, the New York Times reports.

According to the Times, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin held multiple closed-door meetings with company executives in December to develop ways to reassert the company’s dominance in the AI space. The founders departed their daily duties with the search giant and its parent company, Alphabet, in 2019. So, their presence in these meetings underscores how seriously Google views new developments in AI technology.

The Times also reports that it has viewed an internal Google slide show with more than 20 new AI products the company intends to demo “at Google’s company conference in May” (presumably Google I/O 2023). Among the products is Image Generation Studio, an image generator and editor; a new version of A.I. Test Kitchen, an app that runs digital experiments for product prototypes; Shopping Try-on, a YouTube feature for adding backgrounds to videos; Maya, an app for visualizing 3D shoes; as well as two unnamed apps, one for generating wallpapers for Pixel phones, as well as a service that summarizes videos by creating a new video.

Additionally, Google intends to offer AI services to software companies with products aimed at image generation, web browser creation, and app coding. The slew of AI products comes after Google’s already existing LaMDA chat AI program, which the company has already dispensed to a small number of users, according to the Times.

If the Times report is accurate, any notions that Google will take a back seat to startup companies in the AI space should be thoroughly squashed when the company presents these products in May.

Source: The New York Times