Google I/O (aka: Google AI?)

This month, I returned to Google I/O 2024 as an Ambassador for Women Techmakers -- My second time at the tech giant's annual?developer conference?presented?in?Mountain View, California. I attended for the first time as an Ambassador last year , though I've been in their Woman Techmakers Program since 2015, if not earlier.

This year, CEO of Google and Alphabet Sundar Pichai and his team delivered the morning's keynotes on 14 May 2024. A giant screen on stage displayed impressive demos of the company's latest technological updates, which were so heavy on artificial intelligence that I think the conference could have been rebranded Google AI.

Google's blog lists 100 things we announced at I/O 2024, starting with AI moments and model momentum:

1. We introduced Gemini 1.5 Flash : a lighter-weight model that’s designed to be fast and efficient to serve at scale. 1.5 Flash is the fastest Gemini model served in the API.
2. We’ve significantly improved 1.5 Pro, our best model for general performance across a wide range of tasks.
3. Both 1.5 Pro and 1.5 Flash are available in public preview with a 1 million token context window on Google AI Studio and Vertex AI.
4. 1.5 Pro is also available with a 2 million token context window to developers via waitlist in Google AI Studio and Vertex AI .
5. We shared Project Astra : our vision for the future of AI assistants.
6. We announced Trillium , the sixth generation of our custom AI accelerator, the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). It is the most performant TPU to date.
7. Compared to TPU v5e, Trillium TPUs achieve a 4.7x increase in peak compute performance per chip.
8. They’re also our most sustainable generation: Trillium TPUs are over 67% more energy-efficient compared to TPU v5e.
9. And we demoed an early prototype of Audio Overviews for NotebookLM , which uses a collection of uploaded materials to create a verbal discussion personalized for the user.
10. We announced that Grounding with Google Search — a tool that connects the Gemini model with world knowledge, a wide possible range of topics or up-to-date information on the internet — is now generally available on Vertex AI .
11. We added audio understanding in the Gemini API and AI Studio, so Gemini 1.5 Pro can now reason across image and audio for videos uploaded in AI Studio.
12. Starting with Pixel, applications using Gemini Nano with Multimodality will be able to understand the world the way people do — not just through text input but also through sight, sound and spoken language

At one point, a speaker explained how AI can help meal prep without having you eat mac and cheese for breakfast. The man behind me hilariously snarked, "Wow, it's judge-y." Maybe we DO want to eat mac and cheese for breakfast!

That was one of the very human interactions that make traveling cross country for this conference worthwhile.

Although Google I/O is a tech conference for developers to gain firsthand knowledge as well as test the latest products and services, it's an incredibly valuable space for networking with peers offline. I reconnected with Google Developer Mentor and Fellow Women Techmakers Ambassador Anna Nerezova (@blv ) at the end of day 1 --

While AI EDSAFE Fellow, ISTE AI Fellow, and ISTE Community Leader Dr. Dr. Jennifer Camille Dempsey (@DrVirtuality ) made a point to find each other on day 2 --

Serendipitous meetings with other Women Techmakers (I didn't already know) happened throughout the day, especially around lunchtime

and cotton candy time --

I'm certain many new friendships (and professional partnerships!) were forged during the awesome dance party at the end of day 1. As much as we love video conferencing for convenience, there's no better way to cultivate community than in person. Sorry, not sorry. :D

We did get back to business on the morning of day 2, though. A panel of VIP Leaders and Women Techmakers spoke about Women Shaping Google.

Peta-Gay Clarke moderated the panel which included: Sonar Thekdi, Carolin Seward, and Adrienne Lofton. Advice included:

• Know your craft
• Put in the extra effort
• Have a learning and growth mindset
• Gain the respect of your team
• Contribute to the development of your team
• Find champions and mentors
• Mirror the behavior of leaders
• Remain real, authentic, and vulnerable
• Have a breadth of experience
• Understand different types of leadership
• Remove your ego
• Take leaps, it is where you will grow the most
• Understand the business, not just the tech

A long line of women lined up at the end of the panel to ask questions.

Many were interested in learning how to navigate their particular career trajectories.

Looking at the schedule board, I was surprised to see a dialogue about Quantum computing: Facts, fiction and the future. I had coincidentally been speaking with MIT and CalTech alumnus Dr. Mika Nystr?m about this very topic the day prior. As an engineer, he strongly believes that "we're missing some understanding of physics that would explain why quantum computers are impossible, just like Schr?dinger's cat. Quantum computing is likely subject to the same issues that make classical analog computers impractical: noise grows in ways that are unpredictable, expensive to mitigate, and ultimately uncontrollable... Furthermore, there's no evidence that quantum error correction corrects errors faster than its costs increase. It will never work."

I ended my second day with the panel on Reimagining Health and Science for Society. Speakers discussed what trust looks like in the context of healthcare. Patients are concerned about the privacy of their data, but may not necessarily understand how AI will use the information that individuals provide.

So this brings me back to the list of 100 things we announced at I/O 2024

which does cover Google's Responsible AI progress:

93. We’re enhancing red teaming — a proven practice where we proactively test our own systems for weakness and try to break them — through a new technique we’re calling “AI-Assisted Red Teaming.”

94. We’re also expanding SynthID to two new modalities: text and video.

95. SynthID text watermarking will also be open-sourced in the coming months through our updated Responsible Generative AI toolkit.

96. We announced LearnLM, a new family of models based on Gemini and fine-tuned for learning. LearnLM is already powering a range of features across our products, including Gemini, Search, YouTube and Google Classroom.

97. We’ll be partnering with experts from institutions like Columbia Teachers College, Arizona State University, NYU Tisch and Khan Academy to refine and expand LearnLM beyond our products.

98. And we also worked with MIT RAISE to develop an online course that equips educators to effectively use generative AI in the classroom.

99. We’ve built a new experimental tool called Illuminate to make knowledge more accessible and digestible.

100. lluminate can generate a conversation consisting of two AI-generated voices, providing an overview of the key insights from research papers. You can sign up to try it today at labs.google .

Technology is developing at an incredible pace and I'm excited to see what comes next. Looking forward to returning to California in 2025!