Google is trying to show the world that it is all in on AI research and products. Some of the company's current and upcoming efforts were showcased on Sunday night during two segments of CBS News' 60 Minutes program.
However, CBS News showed off even more content from that segment on its 60 Minutes Overtime video clips on its YouTube channel. One of those clips demonstrated a couple of unreleased generative AI services. One of them was called "MediaGen" and it will be Google's version of an AI art generator, similar to other programs like Midjourney and Microsoft's Bing Image Creator.
However, Google also showed off an upcoming text-to-video program. The 60 Minutes Overime clip showed that it was called "Google Phenaki". The brief clip showed the program generating some fairly crude animation when it was asked to create a video showing a dog with wings walking in a field. The Google Research division has been working on this Phenaki model for a little while, but it has not gotten a lot of media attention until now. The 60 Minutes Overtime video does say that the new service will not create videos that use humans, for fear of it creating "deep fakes" of people.
The main 60 Minutes segment only briefly mentioned Microsoft's own Bing Chat. Aside from those few seconds, the entire story revolved around Google's current AI efforts, which included a visit to the company's robotics labs. One interesting thing about the story centered on Google Bard is that when asked about how to deal with returning inflation in advanced economies, Bard listed five books to learn more about the subject. The only problem is that all five books didn't exist. In that instance, Bard had an "hallucination" and made up the titles, authors, and descriptions in the list.
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