I/O 2024 preview: How does Google become the AI-first company 

At I/O 2016 and 2017, Sundar Pichai said Google was moving from “mobile first to AI first.” This involved “rethinking all [its] products and applying machine learning,” with search in Photos and Smart Reply being early examples of that. However, for much of last year, Google was considered to be on the back foot with applying large language models, and this AI-first proclamation was largely forgotten.

Historically, I/O is where Google makes its biggest announcements of the year. That being said, the AI race has forced the company to make more frequent announcements in the past year, not necessarily at the pace it otherwise would have. With I/O 2024 a few days away, here’s what we expect Google to announce.

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