UPDATE 5-Alphabet debuts beefed-up AI search and chatbot as competition heats up

tech.hindustantimes.com:

By Max A. Cherney and Jeffrey Dastin

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California, - Google parent Alphabet on Tuesday showed how it is building on artificial intelligence across its businesses, including a beefed-up Gemini chatbot and improvements to search, as it races to compete with AI rivals.

The flurry of announcements underscores Google's efforts to refresh its products since Microsoft-backed OpenAI's 2022 launch of ChatGPT dazzled the public, threatening the incumbent's long reign over online search and AI.

Among Google's latest salvos was an addition to its family of Gemini 1.5 AI models known as Flash that is faster and cheaper to run; a prototype called Project Astra, which can talk to users about anything captured on their smartphone camera in real time; and search results categorized under AI-generated headlines.

"This is a moment of growth and opportunity," Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told reporters, when asked if the AI updates could risk Google's profitable business.

The product presentation at Google's annual I/O developer event in Mountain View, California, followed a shorter showcase by rival OpenAI on Monday. OpenAI demonstrated how ChatGPT could voice answers with human-like intonation to any written or visual prompt. The startup's CEO, Sam Altman, wrote that OpenAI had delivered software that "feels like AI from the movies."

Google's news at times covered similar ground, underscoring the fierce competition between the two AI developers.

For instance, Alphabet's AI unit, Google DeepMind, has worked to build technology that can carry out day-to-day tasks for consumers. Early results have manifested in Project Astra, a tool that can use a smartphone camera and draw conclusions about the world around it.

In a demo video shown during Google I/O, a user deployed it to identify a speaker and locate glasses they had left in another part of the room. The company also teased how it could pair Project Astra with what it calls Gemini Live, a potentially more