Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and doting parent company Alphabet, opened its Google I/O developer conference with a celebration of token and capital expenditures.Tokens are the basic data exchange unit of AI models and Google has vastly increased its token processing to accommodate internal and external demand for AI inference.Two years ago, Pichai said, Google handled 9.7 trillion tokens per month. Last year, it was 480 trillion per month. Currently, the Chocolate Factory handles 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month.
"Now some out there might call this tokenmaxxing and there's probably some truth to it," said Pichai. "I still think it tells an important story about our products and how others are building as well, especially our developers."
Pichai said over 8.5 million developers are building applications using Google's Gemini model family monthly, using about 19 billion tokens per minute in API calls. And over the past 12 months, more than 375 customers have consumed more than 1 trillion tokens each – an indication there's some demand for AI among businesses.That token processing is possible because of the vast capital expenditures Google has made in datacenters and compute capacity, and TPU hardware."Supporting all of this at scale for our users while also serving enterprises and developers around the world requires massive investments in infrastructure," said Pichai. "And we've been investing for today and for the future. In 2022, we were spending $31 billion annually in capex. This year, we expect that number to be about six times that, approximately 180 to 190 billion dollars."Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, took a turn on stage to provide an update on Google's progress toward AGI – artificial general intelligence – that ill-defined point when AI models perform some set of tasks as well as a human.Gemini Omni, Hassabis suggested, is a step in that direction. It can, he said, "create anything from any input," meaning digital stuff as opposed to atomic replication."It combines Gemini's intelligence with the best of our generative media models for a new level of world understanding, multimodality and editing," he explained.Gemini Omni combines video, image, and interactive simulation capabilities of models like Veo, Nano Banana, and Genie with physics modeling, so projects accurately depict object interactions involving kinetic energy and gravity.The first model in that family, Gemini Omni Flash, is now available.
