Google ‘Live from Paris’ AI event live: all the latest on Maps, Search and more

Microsoft struck first yesterday with its new ChatGPT-flavored version of Bing – and now it’s Google’s turn to show its AI hand during today’s ‘Live from Paris’ event.

Google has been coy about what exactly it’s going to announce during today’s event, but we can be pretty sure AI will be big theme. The search giant announced Bard earlier this week, an “experimental conversational AI service” that will be released in “the coming weeks”.

Today’s event, which could match Microsoft’s for significance, will likely expand on Bard and how Google plans to use AI to change the way we use Maps, Search and more. It kicks off at 8:30am ET / 5:30am PT / 1:30pm GMT, or 1:30am ACT on February 9 for those in Australia.

Google’s description of the event is certainly bold – it will apparently be “reimagining how people search for, explore and interact with information”. So probably worth a watch then, to put it mildly.

The new features will definitely affect Search and Maps, but Google’s invite page (above) suggests it could be bringing AI smarts to the likes of Google Lens, too. You can watch the livestream with us below – and we’ll be bringing you all of our reactions to the news as it happens.

(Image credit: Google)

Good morning and welcome to our Google ‘Live from Paris’ liveblog.

It’s another exciting day in AI-land, as Google prepares to counter-punch Microsoft’s big announcements for Bing and Edge yesterday. This week’s tussle reminds me of the big heavyweight tech battles of the early 2010s, when Microsoft and Google traded petty attacks over mobile and desktop software.

But this is a new era and the squared circle is now AI and machine learning. Microsoft seems to think it can steal a march on Google Search – and against all odds, it might actually do it. I’ll reserve judgement until we see what Google announced today. 

(Image credit: Google)

So what exactly are we expecting to see from Google today? Clearly, Search is going to be the big theme, as we start to get more detail on exactly how Google’s conversational AI is going to be baked into Search.

Any big change to Search would clearly be a huge deal, as Google has barely changed the external UI of the minimalist bar most of us type into without thinking.

But we’re more likely to see baby steps today – Google has called Bard an “experimental” feature and it’s only based on a “lightweight model version” of LaMDA AI tech (which is short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, if you were wondering). 

Like Microsoft’s new Bing, any integration of Bard in search will likely be presented as an optional extra rather than a replacement for the classic search bar – but even that would be huge news for a search engine that has 84% market share (for now, at least).