How Google Invented the Pixel 8: A Parade of Artificial Intelligence – a Reflection on Tim Cook at Good Morning America
Except, when I went back to watch Google’s 20-minute presentation on the original Pixel, I didn’t catch anyone actually saying the phrase “AI” onstage. Although the phone was made for virtual reality, there was only a few explicit mentions of artificial intelligence.
There is no problem for anyone who is buying or owning a Pixel device. But while Google can call itself an AI company all it likes, people ultimately just want phones filled with useful features. At a certain point, it could be risky to put the cart in front of the horse.
Its preference is to emphasize the machine learning’s benefits, which is a good thing for the company. As Tim Cook put it in an interview with Good Morning America today, “We do integrate it into our products [but] people don’t necessarily think about it as AI.”
This is not a big problem for most of the time. Who cares about how the heart rate algorithm works when it is accurate? Even though artificial intelligence was involved in the photography process of the Pixel 8, the results will have to speak for themselves.
The Brunel AI Project as a Tech Demo for Generative Artificial Intelligence: A Case Study on Google, Microsoft and Graphcore
It makes sense as a tech demo for generative artificial intelligence. One of the main strengths of generative artificial intelligence is writing in a particular style that is filled with cliches and peppy social media image caption.
But ignore the AI part and think of this purely as a smartphone feature, and I think it’s utterly baffling. It makes sense for a phone to draft our social media posts for us if we want them. What is the point? Why are you publishing the caption in the first place, if you are asking the machine to draft an image caption? What is going on here?
I have a theory, and it’s that — in the absence of a killer app for generative AI — Google is throwing features at a wall and seeing what sticks. It feels like the search giant has a hammer labeled “generative AI,” and its search for nails is taking the company to weird places. Then we can consider the implications of building artificial intelligence directly into the photo service.
It seems like it’s because of an anxiety at Google to avoid being left out in the middle of the hype. When Microsoft announced it was integrating generative AI into Bing, CEO Satya Nadella positioned it as a direct shot across the bow at Google. “I hope that, with our innovation, they will definitely want to come out and show that they can dance,” Nadella said. “And I want people to know that we made them dance.” Since then, Google has enthusiastically tap-danced through every one of its presentations.
The Brunel AI project should have been a big moment for another Bristolian export—Graphcore, one of the UK’s only large-scale chipmakers specializing in designing hardware for AI. The company is trying to counter the dominance of the US giant, which is valued at over $2 billion after a funding round in 2020. With AI fast becoming an issue of geopolitical as well as commercial importance, and countries—including the UK—spending hundreds of millions of dollars on building strategic reserves of chips and investing in massive supercomputers, companies like Graphcore should be poised to benefit. In May, Graphcore’s CEO wrote to the government, asking for some of the exascale project’s funding to go to British chipmakers.
But that deal hasn’t come through, and the company has struggled to turn early hype around its products into sales. This week, Graphcore filed accounts showing that it urgently needs to raise new funding. If it can’t do so by May next year, the company faces “material uncertainty” over whether it can remain a going concern, as losses mount.
Graphcore was founded in 2016 and has spent the last few years building the next generation of chips. IPUs are intelligence processing units, which are the focus of Graphcore, rather than the current standard for graphics processing units. Graphcore claims that the IPUs are better suited to the specific requirements of AI than the Graphics Processing Units. Early investors included Microsoft—now one of the giants in the vanguard of AI, and a big backer of OpenAI, developer of the ChatGPT chatbot. In 2020, Graphcore ceased being used in Microsoft’s cloud computing centers.
It’s believed that Graphcore may have been unsuccessful because of its different technology from those used by users. He believes Graphcore is not able to take these researchers and engineers in a smooth way from the Nvidia-dominated scene into their own thing.