Several announcements were made at I/O’s developer keynote, including new software betas, updates to Google’s web page ranking methodology and a new managed machine learning platform. In this blog, we cover the major keynotes of the Google I/O event that developers shouldn’t miss out on.
Google continues to approach its mission with a unified goal- being more helpful for everyone, especially in the moments that matter. For instance, as per the Google Maps update, a safer routing in Maps may help people in little moments but add up to bigger changes. The AI-powered Map can identify road and traffic conditions where you are likely to break. Let’s dive into the key announcements.
Key Announcements of Google I/O 2021
1. Responsible Next-gen AI
Even after multiple advancements, there are instances when computers just don’t understand people. With Pichai’s latest research in natural language understanding of LaMDA, Google announced a more natural and efficient search for people.
LaMDA is an open domain and language model for dialogue applications that help to converse on any topic. Google focuses on ensuring LaMDA meets our incredibly high standards of fairness, safety, and privacy. It is a massive step forward in natural conversation, but it’s still only trained on text.
There is a need to develop Multimodal models to ask questions naturally. With these models, you could plan a one-day road trip by asking Google to “find a trip with beautiful mountain or lake views.” This way, natural conversations can be enhanced.
2. Pushing computing forward
Another announcement was the next generation of TPUs: the TPU v4. These are more than twice as fast as the previous generation. One pod can deliver way more than one exaflop, equivalent to the computing power of 10 million laptops combined. This is the fastest system ever deployed and a historic milestone for Google.
3. Safer All the Way
The focus on data minimization pushes Google to do more with fewer data. Since Google made Auto-Delete the default for all new Google Accounts in their last I/O, they’ve been determined to do better. After 18 months now, they automatically delete your activity data unless you tell them to do it sooner.
4. Solving complex sustainability challenges
Google’s next ambition is their biggest yet: operating on carbon-free energy by the year 2030. This represents a significant step-change from current approaches and is a moonshot on the same scale as quantum computing. They also presented some hard problems to solve, from sourcing carbon-free energy in every location they operate to ensuring it can run every hour of every day.
5. APIs for Chrome
Web developers also need to be aware of several upcoming changes, including new hardware APIs for Chrome that will give it access to devise peripherals. Also, Google plans to phase out third-party cookies from Chrome completely.
6. Core web vitals
Those changes may be big but are nothing compared to the big web announcement made in the keynote: Ranking calculations will be changing to what Google called “core web vitals.” The vitals consist of three major elements that determine an ideal and fast website- Load speed, responsiveness, and stability.
7. Flutter 2.2 news
Google announced the release of Flutter 2.2- updating the UI toolkit to add improved support for desktops. Dev tools display how memory is allocated by web apps, making null safety the default for app development and tighter integration for Flutter-designed apps with Google services.
8. Firebase: Advanced features
The Firebase development platform is also updated with new features. One of the most impressive ones is the Personalization element of Remote Config. The element uses Android’s on-device machine learning capabilities to automatically deliver the best remote configuration of an app to users based on need. All Firebase developers need to provide different configuration options.
9. New managed machine learning platform: Vertex AI
Of all the announcements made, the largest one came towards the last: the launch of a new managed machine learning platform called Vertex AI. The platform will train machine learning models without user datasets and provide metrics to make predictions to enhance transparency.
Vertex AI also allows developers/coders to build pipelines -allowing it to manage ML systems in prediction and update. It could detect how attacker tactics change over time, train itself to adapt to those new tactics and push changes inside an automated workflow.
In all, Google covered much information in a relatively limited amount of time in the developer keynote. To learn more about the announcements and watch breakout sessions of the announcements covered in this blog, you must check out https://events.google.com/io/?lng=en. For any other information/questions on Google I/O 2021, please feel free to contact our experts.
