AI is where ‘curiosity and discovery live’, says Google

Google’s business strategist Yvette Baez said Artificial Intelligence (AI) is where curiosity and discovery live.

Baez was speaking during Google’s virtual AI in Action flagship event at Century City Hotel and virtually, across Sub-Saharan Africa on Monday.

Google among other mobile and tech companies have been making huge strides in AI.

Baez said AI is research in motion.

“AI is what we don’t know. We’ve been accustomed to asking very specific questions to search and getting the binary yes and no answer. The beauty of artificial intelligence and Gemini, which is our most sophisticated AI model because it’s multimodal, is that it has the ability to respond with sight, with sounds, with images, with video.”

World’s information

Baez said AI, through the lens of Google, is in the business of aggregating the world’s information and making it available and useful.

“Think about the impact it has to healthcare globally. One of the largest challenges and opportunities that we have in healthcare is closing healthcare disparities by making healthcare information readily available to patients all over the world. AI is being used by pharmaceutical companies globally to do everything like identifying new drugs.

“Drug discovery has traditionally taken hundreds of years and we use AI’s technology to identify new molecules, which will accelerate the development of new drugs,” Baez said.

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Leading tomorrow

Baez said AI is playing a critical role in educating the masses, not just the opportunities it presents, but the applicability using Gemini and all of the other AI models that are available by Google.

“I hope to be able to lead the audience tomorrow with an understanding of why Gemini is the most powerful AI model we’ve ever built.

“The idea that it is multimodal, that it is based on natural conversational language, and that we should think about artificial intelligence always mimicking and mirroring human intelligence, and how powerful a tool that can be to help us solve real world issues today and in the future,” Baez said.

Conversational AI

Conversational AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can simulate human conversation.

It is made possible by natural language processing (NLP), a field of AI that allows computers to understand and process human language and Google’s foundation models that power new generative AI capabilities.

It is impossible to predict all the ways in which AI will change our lives, but one sure bet is that virtual assistants will help us navigate this brave new world. Some will be built in your smartphones, but companies also hope that consumers will find space for an extra AI gadget.

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