Dive Brief:
- Google said it will expand enterprise access to its Gemini models Tuesday, improving capabilities and adding to its model portfolio, the company said during its I/O conference.
- Gemini 1.5 Pro is now available in the side panel of Gmail, Docs, Drive, Slides and Sheets. The company updated Gemini 1.5 Pro to better understand images, introduced a smaller Gemini 1.5 Flash model and added two Gemma models to its portfolio.
- The Gmail mobile app is also getting refreshed with Contextual Smart Reply, an email summarization and question-and-answer capability powered by Gemini.
Dive Insight:
Google, once blindsided by ChatGPT’s success, doesn’t want to get caught trailing again.
“The Google that we are seeing today is executing like an AI innovation leader,” Chirag Dekate, VP analyst at Gartner, told CIO Dive, noting that OpenAI’s first multimodal model came five months after Google announced its set.
Google also has the advantage of being able to embed new models across its product suite, Dekate said.
All of Google’s products now use Gemini. In the three months after its introduction, Pichai said more than 1 million users signed up to try out Gemini Advanced, the conversational AI tool formerly known as Bard.
Tens of thousands of companies have used generative AI in Workspace over the past year, according to Google.
“We’ve talked about two technical advances: multimodality and long context,” CEO Sundar Pichai said during the I/O conference. “Each is powerful on its own. But together, they unlock deeper capabilities and more intelligence. This comes to life with Google Workspace.”
Once the capabilities are available, users can ask Gemini to summarize recent emails, analyze attachments, provide key points or action items, point out highlights from a missed meeting and draft replies to emails, Google said.
Google’s generative AI updates follow a slew of announcements from its competitors. Microsoft on Monday introduced Places, an AI-powered hybrid office management app that can connect to Copilot, and AWS made its generative AI-powered assistant, Amazon Q, generally available on the heels of its April earnings call.
Even OpenAI held a spring update session earlier this week, in which CTO Mira Murati gave an update on the company’s progress. Murati unveiled an updated flagship model, GPT-4o, or GPT-4 Omni during the Monday session.
