It’s the Sundar Show at Google’s I/O gala
Conference is CEO’s first big chance to detail vision for future
Pichai, the executive behind the Chrome and Android operating systems, has headlined I/O before. But this is his first time as CEO.
When Google kicks off its annual get-together for developers Wednesday, expect an alphabet (pun intended) of every major tech trend: VR, AR, AI.
Thousands will descend on Mountain View, Calif., for Google’s annual I/O conference. This is the first year the technology giant is holding the conference in its hometown, and Google’s added conference, sandwiched between Facebook in April and Apple in June, is vying to put on the greatest show on earth for software developers.
The overly ambitious agenda is typical for a company mythologized for its moon shots such as driverless cars, and whose market value under its parent company, Alphabet, passed Apple for tops in the world last week. This year’s edition is its first after a radical restructuring that created the Alphabet parent and named Sundar Pichai as Google CEO.
For weeks, workers have been building a Googlethemed park to immerse software developers in the artificial intelligence-powered future that Google envisions. The outdoor venue, the Shoreline Ampitheatre, is most famous for showcasing the talents of Neil Young, The Who and Metallica. For I/O, the master of ceremonies is Pichai, Google’s newly minted chief executive who will look to dazzle developers with a demo-packed keynote.
Pichai has headlined I/O before. As the executive behind the Chrome and Android operating systems, he’s a familiar figure to software developers. But this marks the first time he’s addressing them since being promoted to the top job last August.
That promotion simultaneously made Pichai one of the world’s most powerful tech executives and responsible for the direction of the most lucrative Internet company. When he takes the stage at the Shoreline Ampitheater for a two-hour keynote, it will be the Sundar Show, his first shot at articulating his vision for Google.
His vision is led by a core belief: That we are increasingly moving toward a world that runs on artificial intelligence, meaning no matter what screen we are interfacing with — a smartphone, tablet, dashboard, watch or other wearable, virtual-reality device, refrigerator or microwave — and no matter where we are — work, home, on the go — we will be aided along the way by the invisible hands of super-smart machines.
Announcements at I/O are as closely guarded as state secrets, but they will reflect that mindset. The way Pichai sees it: Google will become a super-smart assistant helping you throughout your day, supplying all the information
you need to complete tasks.
The Google CEO telegraphed his thinking in April when he was tapped to pen the company’s annual founders letter in lieu of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. “Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the ‘device’ to fade away,” Pichai wrote.
“Google has always been an AI company from the start and is now an AI company more than ever as Google doubles down on AI, on machine learning and on deep learning,” said veteran technology journalist Steven Levy, author of In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our
Lives. “It’s not a coincidence that AI is centered in the Google part of Alphabet because it’s really going to be the center of where Google is going in what has become quite a spirited race in artificial intelligence. Basically, the biggest companies and Google’s fiercest competitors realize this is where the battleground is.”
While for years Google was a pioneer in AI, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon all share the same ambition, Levy says, “to be at the center of our lives.” That means collecting vast amounts of data and employing the smartest algorithms to make sense of that data.
Facebook is staking its future on advances in artificial intelligence with Mark Zuckerberg making it a key part of his 10-year plan. Among Facebook’s initiatives: a digital personal assistant named “M.” Microsoft is also experimenting with digital personal assistants and chatbots to converse with us. Even Amazon is betting big on AI with its new digital assistant Alexa that turns its Echo into an indispensable digital hub in your home.
And artificial intelligence will play a key role in new technologies, namely virtual reality, which will play a starring role at I/O this year. Pichai is targeting virtual reality as the next major computing platform.