Yesterday, Google held its annual I/O conference keynote and, as expected, introduced a bevy of AI tools and products that it believes will completely transform the company as we know it today.
Writing on the company blog, CEO Sundar Pichai explained how the 2023 launch of Google’s Gemini AI model was the start of a new era for the search giant. “A year ago on the I/O stage we first shared our plans for Gemini: a frontier model built to be natively multimodal from the beginning, that could reason across text, images, video, code, and more,” he wrote. “It marks a big step in turning any input into any output — an ‘I/O’ for a new generation.”
And to help introduce that new generation, Google made a commercial using one of the most beloved songs in Jay-Z’s catalog — 2003’s “Public Service Announcement (Interlude),” from his eighth full length The Black Album. The ad, called “Welcome to the Gemini Era,” premiered on YouTube and features clips from the keynote that highlight all the new products and functionalities that AI model will bring to consumers.
The clip starts with the somber keys Just Blaze sampled from The Little Boy Blues’s “The Seed of Love” as Google’s homepage appears on screen. Then, as Jay bellows out, “Allow me to reintroduce myself! My name is,” the Google logo transforms to highlight new AI features.
The tenor of the yesterday’s presentation was that of rebirth. Each executive who took the stage explained how every Google product will be infused with the power of Gemini. Search, imagine and video generation, virtual assistants, and more will all inherit new features thanks to this company-wide AI push.
Outside of Gemini’s new multimodal capabilities, the most interesting part of the keynote for creators and artists involved the introduction of Veo, Google DeepMind’s generative video model. According to Kory Mathewson, a Google DeepMind research scientist, Veo is “trained to convert input text to output video.” And to help introduce that product, Google tapped Donald Glover who praised the technology because it will allow artists to “make a mistake faster, which is all you really want at the end of the day.”
You can watch the entire keynote presentation below.