Google AI is a division of Google dedicated to artificial intelligence. It was announced at Google I/O 2017 by CEO Sundar Pichai.

Projects

• Serving cloud-based TPUs (tensor processing units) in order to develop machine learning software.
• Development of TensorFlow.
• The TensorFlow Research Cloud will give researchers a free cluster of one thousand cloud TPUs to perform machine learning research on, under the condition that the research is open source and they put their findings and publish it in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
• Portal to over 5500 (as of September 2019) research publications by Google staff.
• Magenta: a deep learning research team exploring the role of machine learning as a tool in the creative process. The team has released many open source projects allowing artists and musicians to extend their processes using AI.
• Sycamore: a new 54-Qubit Programmable Quantum Processor.

More on Google AI

In addition to using its new TPUs for its own projects, Google plans to sell access to them through the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). That makes the product to some degree a threat to Nvidia (NVDA) , whose Tesla server CPUs are widely used for AI training work. It should be noted, however, that Google (like other cloud giants) remains a big Nvidia client, and that Pichai gave a shout-out during his keynote to Nvidia's powerful new Tesla V100 GPU.

There were also a slew of other AI-related efforts that were discussed during Google's I/O keynote. These included the use of machine learning to improve Google Search, have Google Maps' Street View cameras automatically detect signs and to help pathologists analyze high-resolution imagery for signs of cancer.

Ultimately, however, the biggest takeaway from the keynote isn't how useful Google's AI algorithms for one particular task or another. It's how the company's AI work in general has become a core competitive advantage whose presence is being felt company-wide.