Google’s AI strategy is finally coming into focus
In a major salvo in the AI race, Google announced on Tuesday a slew of new and updated products at its I/O developer conference. These ranged from tools that deploy personal AI agents to code generators, search tools, and a new “world model” for generating physically accurate video. Taken together, the releases paint a picture of Google’s current strategy for bringing AI to consumers and businesses. It’s a strategy that effectively leverages the company’s vast information infrastructure, built up through search, in ways that give it clear advantages over newer AI companies. New models Google DeepMind’s newest models are bigger and smarter, deeply multimodal, and tuned for taking actions. Many of the new products and features announced at I/O are powered by the new Gemini 3.5 Flash model. Google says the model is optimized for speed and efficiency, is four times faster than other frontier models, and costs between one-half and one-third the price of comparable models. Gemini 3.1 Pro was previously DeepMind’s best model, and 3.5 Flash outperforms it on nearly all benchmarks, notably coding and tool use. There is also a Gemini 3.5 Pro model, which will become DeepMind’s new flagship model, but researchers are still studying its safety implications and plan to release it publicly sometime in June. “All our focus with the 3.5 series has been on taking the model intelligence and making sure tool use, instruction following, long-horizon use cases, and agent decoding all work well,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said during a call with reporters Monday. Google also announced its entry into the growing race to build “world models,” or models that can create digital environments or video that remains true to real-world physical properties. Gemini Omni, as it’s called, is multimodal, meaning it can generate various kinds of outputs (video, images, text, audio, and more) based on prompts that include content in those same formats. One example: A user can provide an image of herself, along with a video, and the model will use high-level reasoning to let her likeness stand in as a character in the video. Google is launching a small version of Omni, Omni Flash, today. A larger Omni Pro model is currently in development. Flexing its advantages Before saying a word about its new models, Google spoke about the infrastructure it has built to support them. Google says it expects to spend up to $190 billion on new infrastructure this year. Much of that will go toward new data centers where Gemini models run on hundreds of thousands of Google’s own AI chips.
Source: Fast Company