Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s AI talk at a university commencement speech this weekend drew a chorus of boos. But if the students’ reaction was a sign of anxiety, or ambivalence, about the rapid onslaught of AI in our daily lives, the message clearly did not reach Google headquarters.
At the company’s annual developer conference in Mountain View, Calif. on Tuesday, AI was the overwhelming, and virtually sole focus, of the roughly two hours of keynote presentations delivered by executives. Google showcased a variety of new ways AI will be integrated even more deeply across its widely used family of products, from search and email to productivity software and smart glasses.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, kicked off the Google I/O event praising AI’s role in helping students prep for exams and allowing artists and musicians to get into their “creative flow” as the world moves into the “agentic AI era.”
In a very visible sign of how important AI has become to the $4.7 trillion company, Google said it was redesigning the iconic search box that sits at the center of its sparse, all-white homepage. The company is enlarging the dimensions of the search box to expand and better accommodate the natural language queries that users can now make with AI. Users will also now be able to enlist AI agents for complex, ongoing research projects via the search box, ordering up custom reports for anything from apartment hunting to financial news.
Pichai touted the dizzying amounts of money the company is spending to build AI infrastructure and the massive consumption of AI “tokens”—the basic unit of AI data processing—being gobbled up by customers. Google now processes 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month, Pichai said, up from 480 trillion monthly tokens a year ago.
The company’s capital expenditures—a cause of concern among some Wall Street investors—were projected behind Pichai on a giant screen as the the CEO described plans to spend between $180 billion and $190 billion this year, compared to $31 billion in 2022.
“We are taking a differentiated full stack approach to AI innovation, from our custom silicon and secure foundation to our world class research and models to our products and platforms that reach billions of people,” Pichai said.
A new line of AI-enabled, audio-equipped glasses will debut in the fall, Google said, introducing a new product line called “intelligent eyewear.” While Google did not provide a time frame for the general availability of smart glasses with built-in displays such as the ones it demonstrated at I/O last year, the company showed off the forthcoming audio glasses—built in partnership with Samsung, Warby Parker, and eyewear maker Gentle Monster—which will let users make appointments, get directions, and go through their emails by listening and speaking while wearing the glasses.
