Many rumors are circulating around the announcements that the Californian group will make at Google I/O, its annual event.

One certainty: the company will release its first folding smartphone, the "Pixel Fold". She tweeted last week "May the Fold be with you" with a mini video showing a cell phone unfolding, like the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4.

Observers are also hoping for a new tablet or watch, still in the Pixel range, and improvements for Android, the dominant mobile operating system.

But Google is primarily expected on the generative AI front (capable of creating content on demand in everyday language), where Microsoft has taken a step ahead in recent months thanks to its significant investments in OpenAI.

Since the launch in November of the ChatGPT interface, designed by Californian startup OpenAI, the two competitors have since competed with announcements, as they add generative AI features to their software, from the venerable Word word processor to the Gmail mailbox.

The Redmond firm (Washington State, northwest) has integrated ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, thus relaunching this portal so far negligible compared to Google.

"Not the first"

Microsoft on Thursday opened access to the new Bing to all and unveiled various improvements supposed to turn the software into a "co-pilot" of Internet users.

"Bing has surpassed 100 million daily active users, and the number of mobile app installs has quadrupled since launch," said Yusuf Mehdi, the company's vice president.

The chatbot can also now generate images and users will soon be able to make requests for images. On Edge, Microsoft's web browser, the chat window with Bing will remain active even when users switch from one site to another.

According to CNBC, Google could make similar announcements about its platforms and Bard, its rival ChatGPT chatbot, which opened to the public in late March.

As OpenAI's main investor, Microsoft has added the Californian startup's latest language model, GPT-4, to Bing, turning online search into a dialogue with a chatbot © Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP/Archives

The group is expected to present "PaLM 2", a more advanced version of PaLM, its language model (the technology that underpins generative AI), according to the US business chain.

"Some of our most successful products weren't the first to market," Pichai reminded employees in February, according to an internal email seen by CNBC.

"They grew because they met important user needs and were built with deep expertise," he added.

'Existential threat'

OpenAI launched in March GPT-4, a "large multimedia model (...) as successful as humans in many professional and academic contexts." The boss of the startup Sam Altman explained working towards the so-called "general" artificial intelligence, that is to say programs with human cognitive abilities.

Since then, many experts have expressed concern about the rapid deployment of this new technology, going so far as to call for a six-month pause in research.

Geoffrey Hinton, considered one of the founding fathers of AI, said on May 3 that the "existential threat" that AI posed to humanity was "serious and close", during a round table organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

The computer scientist has just left Google, where he had worked for ten years, "to be able to talk about the dangers of AI" freely, he explained.

Alphabet, the company's parent company, laid off about 12,000 people in January (6% of its workforce), and revised downwards its real estate plans.

© 2023 AFP