Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google, has said for more than a year that artificial intelligence will remake everything the internet company does. Finally, for people gathering at the company’s annual developer conference in Silicon Valley this week, there was a sense of how big that change might be.
In the most visible demonstration of its ambitions to extend the reach of its AI-powered services, Google launched its intelligent assistant — known, simply, as Assistant — as an app on Apple’s iPhone, pitting it directly against Apple’s Siri in a showdown of the intelligent agents.
Less noticed but perhaps more important was Google’s announcement of a new computing service for businesses and governments hoping to draw on the same AI that powers the company’s own services. “We realise we’re not going to solve all the world’s machine-learning problems ourselves,” said Jeff Dean, one of the company’s top AI researchers.