What's New On AI's Block: Google’s AI-Only Search Engine, Amazon’s AI-Based Dubbing, & More

Since the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, artificial intelligence (AI) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) products and services have been in major demand.

This has also resulted in a massive influx of new startups entering the arena, while established technology companies are restructuring their operations, workforces, and budget allocations to ensure they remain competitive.

The competition is so fierce that AI companies are striving to constantly produce and deliver the latest AI-powered products, infusing the technology into anything and everything they can.

In one of its latest moves, Google brought GenAI capabilities to its most popular product—Google Search—through AI Overviews.

The feature sees Google’s AI scour the internet and provide users with a summarized answer of queries they search for on its search engine. The service has been used by over a billion people and remains one of the most popular features on Search.

As such, Google is bringing its coveted Gemini 2.0 AI model to AI Overviews in the United States “to help with harder questions, starting with coding, advanced math, and multimodal queries, with more on the way.”

The idea is to provide faster and higher-quality responses to complex queries.

Google is also trialing AI Mode, a new feature that expands what AI Overviews offers, applying more advanced reasoning, thinking, and multimodal capabilities to even tougher questions that require further exploration and elaboration.

Powered by a custom version of Gemini 2.0, users can ask nuanced questions that might have previously taken multiple searches to get helpful AI-powered responses supported by links. It collates high-quality content from across the web along with fresh, real-time sources.

Google has amassed feedback internally and from trusted testers, and so far, the response has been positive, especially appreciating the “speed, quality and freshness of responses.” Now, Google is expanding its testing with a limited, opt-in experience in Labs.


Of late, Google has been pushing hard in the AI sector. The company recognizes that the AI sector has numerous challenges—particularly security and safety.

This is why the company introduced a new solution—AI Protection—which comes with capabilities that are designed to safeguard AI workloads and data across clouds and models, enabling businesses to mitigate risks throughout the AI lifecycle. AI Protection helps teams manage AI risks by discovering AI inventory, securing AI assets with controls, policies, and guardrails, and detecting, investigating, and responding to threats against AI systems.

This adds to recent AI initiatives that include boosting healthcare and scientific discovery, enhancing shopping, and releasing Gemini Code Assist for individuals among others.
 
Amazon is also testing new AI capabilities!

Soon after introducing the world to the much-awaited all-new Alexa+, Amazon is bringing AI enhancements to Prime Video.

Through a pilot program, Amazon will use AI-based dubbing on licensed movies and series that do not currently have dubbed versions or titles that would not have been dubbed otherwise.

AI-powered dubbing in English and Latin American Spanish will be available for 12 licensed movies and series, including titles such as El Cid: La Leyenda, Mi Mamá Lora, and Long Lost. Amazon plans to add more titles soon.

“AI-aided dubbing is only available on titles that do not have dubbing support, and we are eager to explore a new way to make series and movies more accessible and enjoyable,” said Raf Soltanovich, VP of Technology at Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios. 


It’s not just individual consumers who are reaping the benefits of innovative AI products.

Newly founded AI startup Ceramic.ai—which was created by former Google employee Anna Patterson and Tom Costello, the company’s Chief Scientist—provides enterprises with large-scale model training using faster, more efficient systems and cutting-edge capabilities, using fewer GPUs.

The startup comes with the aim of helping businesses develop models more efficiently, which can scale up to 100x. It’s able to achieve this by providing an enterprise-ready platform that’s fundamentally redesigned to be more scalable. The platform offers exclusive long-context training, which makes it the only platform that can train models on 96,000 words at once without loss of performance.

Ceramic.ai just raised $12 million in a seed funding round led by NEA, with strategic participation from IBM, Samsung Next, Earthshot Ventures, and Alumni Ventures.

At Ceramic.ai, we've rebuilt the AI training infrastructure from the ground up. Our team has re-imagined the mathematical foundations, network protocols, and computational boundaries, unlocking a new level of AI model performance,” reads the company’s blog post announcing its arrival.

“Unlike conventional AI models, Ceramic.ai’s system improves as context length increases, rather than degrading in performance, making it the only viable choice for fast training.”


Do you think Google’s AI-focused search engine will help it capture a top position in the AI market? Do you think Amazon’s dubbing initiative will inspire other companies to follow suit? Do you think Ceramic.ai will be able to challenge current industry leaders with its unique approach?

Let us know in the comments below!