New AI Release: Google Built-In AI

Another week, another AI release. This one is pretty cool.

Google has released a new web platform API and browser feature designed to integrate AI models, including large language models (LLMs), directly into the browser. They’ve called it Built-In AI. With built-in AI, your website or web application can perform AI-powered tasks without needing to deploy or manage its own AI models.

So what are some of the benefits and when should you use it?

Benefits of built-in AI for web developers.

With built-in AI, your browser provides and manages foundational and expert models. Compared to on-device DIY AI, built-in AI offers several advantages:

Ease of Deployment: The browser distributes and updates the models, considering the device's capabilities. This means you don't need to download or update large models yourself, nor worry about storage, runtime memory, serving costs, and other complexities.

Access to Hardware Acceleration: The browser's AI runtime is optimised to leverage the available hardware—whether it's a GPU, NPU, or CPU. This ensures your app achieves the best possible performance on each device.

Benefits of running on-device.

With a built-in AI approach, performing AI tasks on-device becomes straightforward, offering several benefits:

Local Processing of Sensitive Data: On-device AI enhances privacy by processing sensitive data locally. This allows you to offer AI features with end-to-end encryption, ensuring greater data security.

Snappy User Experience: Eliminating the need for server round-trips can result in near-instant results. On-device AI can transform a feature from being suboptimal to highly responsive and viable.

Greater Access to AI: Utilising users' devices for processing can expand access to AI features. For instance, you can provide previews of premium AI features using on-device AI, showcasing the benefits without incurring additional costs. This hybrid approach also helps manage inference costs, particularly for frequently used features.

Offline AI Usage: Users can access AI features even without an internet connection. This ensures your sites and web apps function as expected offline or with variable connectivity.

When to Use Built-in AI.

Here are some scenarios where built-in AI can benefit you and your users:

AI-Enhanced Content Consumption: This includes features like summarisation, translation, content-based question answering, categorisation, and characterisation.

AI-Supported Content Creation: This covers writing assistance, proofreading, grammar correction, and rephrasing.

Here’s what Taylor Newman our Head of Technology has to say about it:

“This is another great advancement in bringing large language models closer to people's everyday tools and removing the friction around AI tools. The AI evolution is an unavoidable future, but navigating what tools and what platforms to engage with can create a lot of friction around the acceptance and onboarding of AI. Having a large language model baked into the browser itself will allow a stream of seamless integrations, whereby, AI will start to feel like your co worker or companion. I would be excited to see if this extended into scammer protection and AI detection when users use other websites as well”.

To learn about how you can integrate AI into your internal process or enhance your digital experience, get in touch.