Google has shared that it will host an online event on February 8 at 8:30 am ET, called “Live from Paris.” In the 45-minute event, the company will talk about how it will use AI to reshape search and how people interact with information, as the company told Android Police. It will be livestreamed on YouTube.
Google specifies in the YouTube description that the event will revolve around “Search, Maps, and beyond.” Further, exploring and interacting with information is supposed to become “more natural and intuitive than ever before to find what you need.”
The timing of the event is interesting, given that Google I/O is only about three months away when it takes place in its usual slot sometime in the beginning or middle of May. The developer conference itself is also rumored to primarily feature new AI features, with up to 20 to be released this year.
It’s possible that Google wants to react fast to AI advancements from other companies. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a natural language chatbot, has taken the internet by storm, and Microsoft has announced that it will bring the tech behind it to its search engine Bing.
There are reports that ChatGPT caused an internal code red alert at Google, with founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page summoned for an emergency meeting on how to accelerate Google’s own AI projects. Google is reportedly now pushing internal teams tasked with overseeing fairness and ethics in AI to approve projects faster.
The last few years, Google made clear that it is heavily investing in natural language AI, with its own general purpose chatbot LaMDA making headlines last year with a now-fired Google employee claiming that it was sentient, which the company