Google’s chief executive walked onto the four-coloured stage at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View at 11 pm Bangladesh time on Wednesday, thanked the developers in the seats, turned to the millions watching online and named two countries: “We have viewers from Bangladesh and Brazil joining us online.” It was the first country named at Google I/O 2023, and then Sundar Pichai spent the next two hours on one subject.
The AI keynote
“We are at an inflection point,” Pichai said, describing this as the year of AI and reminding the audience that Google — which published the transformer paper in 2017 — was an AI company first. The announcements, in order:
- PaLM 2, Google’s new large language model, in four sizes from one that runs on a phone to one for data centres, with stronger reasoning, coding and multilingual ability — Bangla among the 100-plus languages it was trained on.
- Bard, the ChatGPT rival, switched to PaLM 2, its waitlist removed, and opened to 180 countries — including Bangladesh — in English, Japanese and Korean, with 40 languages to come.
- “Help me write” in Gmail and Docs: type a request, get a draft, coming to Workspace users soon.
- Search Generative Experience: an AI answer at the top of search results, in a US-only lab for now.
- Maps gains real-time weather and an “Immersive View” of routes; Photos, which Pichai said handles 1.7 billion edits a month, gets Magic Editor, which moves people and changes skies.
Hardware followed: the Pixel 7a, the Pixel Fold and the Pixel Tablet.
Why the name-check was not an accident
Bangladesh is among Google’s fastest-growing markets by users — a country adding YouTube viewers and Android phones faster than almost anywhere — and it is one where the company has just spent two years lobbying, unsuccessfully so far, against a data-localisation proposal. Naming it first on the biggest stage of the year costs nothing and is noticed in Dhaka. It also reflects the audience: I/O’s livestream is watched disproportionately by developers in South Asia, and Bangladesh’s Google Developer Groups are among the most active in the region.
What reaches here
Bard is the concrete change: from Wednesday night it works from a Bangladeshi Google account without a waitlist, in English. That is the first frontier chatbot officially available in the country — ChatGPT’s app is not, and its web sign-ups were blocked for weeks. Its Bangla, like ChatGPT’s, is functional and unreliable; the promised 40-language expansion is when it becomes useful to most people. Help me write and the Search experiment arrive with Workspace and the US first, as usual. The 1.7 billion Photos edits, one suspects, include a good many Bangladeshi wedding albums.
