Google has been into AI since the last seven years. It is an AI-first company. We have entered a new era of generative AI. ChatGPT’s introduction towards the end of 2022 got people talking about AI. Google wants all its products infused with AI. Microsoft has already put forward products powered by AI. Generative AI enables us to get content out of thin air. Generative AI models are trained on existing data sets. They, however, go beyond by taking inputs in natural language, and generate content that did not exist. All this costs Google and Microsoft a great deal. It is not yet certain how the generative models can be monetised.

. Generative AI, according to McKinsey , is algorithms that can be used to create new content, including audio, code, images, text, simulations and videos.

The answers to our queries are accurate to the extent these tools have been trained. They generate true-to-life images just in response to a text description. These could code to fulfill the purpose stated. With a mere prompt, these models can write a scholarly thesis.

There are concerns for the misuse of the technology. There are concerns for privacy. There is a need for responsible AI. Sam Altman of OpenAI wants US Congress to form regulation for AI. There are ethical issues of copyright and IP. LLMs take lot of computing power to get trained. Some express the fear that AI could become like Terminator. It takes over the world.

All said and done, AI is a useful tool having myriad of applications. Sam Altman says, OpenAI has been founded on the belief that AI has the potential to improve nearly every aspect of our life. If this technology goes wrong, It can go quite wrong.

Generative AI models so far were very energy-intensive. They run on the cloud. However, models such as Stable Diffusion from Qualcomm can run on smart phones. There could be hybrid AI that distributes processing between the edge and the cloud. The jury is still out on whether smart phones require new architecture to support generative processing.

Google’s PaLM2 AI language model has been released. It rivals Open AI’s GPT-4. One version of PALM2 runs on smart phones. It is called Gecko. If processing could be done on edge, it will ensure that data of text and images would not leave the device, thus maintaining privacy.