Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In today’s edition…Google drops Gemini 2.0 and much more; Character.ai gets hit with another lawsuit; Apple launches its ChatGPT integration; and a new study links AI-enhanced mammograms to better breast cancer detection.
Google yesterday lit up the tech news with a slew of new AI-related releases and announcements. Among them are Gemini 2.0 (the company’s newest flagship model), a lower latency Flash model, and its sixth-generation AI chip. There’s also Deep Research, a tool that lets Gemini scour the internet and write detailed reports (similar to the new Corpora.ai tool I covered last week), and Jules, an AI-coding assistant. In the world of AI agents, Google said it’s testing AI agents based on Gemini 2.0 that can help players with video games. It also introduced Project Mariner, a prototype AI agent that can control Google Chrome.
On one hand, that’s a deluge of AI product launches. On another, it’s an increasingly typical day in our new AI world where the pace of product rollouts can only be described as "fast and furious." OpenAI is in the midst of 12 days of product launches and demos, and all the smaller players are releasing models, agent technologies, and other similar AI products just about every day. Aside from just the constant pace of releases, it’s starting to feel a little like Groundhog Day (the movie) in terms of the offerings—the models and products being released are all very similar, with little differentiation emerging in the market.
Breaking out from the crowd
According to Google, Gemini 2.0 has slightly improved multimodal capabilities, offers more coding assurance, and can take actions across the web. It continues the trend of incremental improvement in AI development—not to mention chasing the dream of the AI agent that can take over tasks for us humans. Every AI developer these days is claiming “agentic” capabilities. Anthropic recently released a similar model that can control browsers, OpenAI is reportedly gearing up to release one early next year, and of course Meta is working on AI agents, too. All year, AI companies zeroed in on enterprise AI tools. And just last week, Google, OpenAI, and Amazon all released video generating models within two days.
The step-pace in the arenas of foundational models, media generation, and personal chatbots isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does beg the question of how AI developers will differentiate their offerings and win over customers. How will users evaluate all the options? And how will they ever keep up amid all the new releases? Will OpenAI’s first-to-market-advantage propel it in the long run, or will Google’s integrations with so much of the software people already use prove decisive? Ads for AI products are already everywhere—will this marketing sway users?
Impactful, niche models don’t capture the consumer marketshare
Of the main players in AI, Google DeepMind has differentiated itself with the pursuit of niche, scientific models like AlphaFold, which has revolutionized the understanding of proteins and can boost drug discovery, and GenCast, its advanced weather model, an improved version of which it released last week. With clear and specific use cases, these types of models could be key to proving generative AI isn’t hype. The problem is that models used by select scientists don’t help cement a company’s brand in the public imagination or lead to significant consumer market share or revenue.
But niche models can have big, important impacts—as an item below in today’s newsletter about AI-enhanced mammograms shows. Just a few months ago, AlphaFold earned its creators the Nobel Prize.
It’s been a year of constant product rollouts in AI, and yet it’s taking a while for people to digest all this tech. We’ll see what next year brings—and if more people start to see real, tangible benefits from the use of these tools..
And with that, here’s more AI news.
Sage Lazzaro
sage.lazzaro@consultant.fortune.com
sagelazzaro.com
