Mountain View (US), May 20 -- On Tuesday, Google chief Sundar Pichai opened his keynote at the company's keenly-watched annual developer conference, I/O, with a statistic-the number of developers working with the tech giant's artificial intelligence tools has swelled 5x in the past year to 7 million.

Pichai, accompanied by a slew of key executives, made over 15 announcements across all fronts-a new AI model with more reasoning capability for better generative performance, an 'AI Mode' for its mammoth search engine, an AI-driven 3D video conferencing platform called Beam, live speech translation on Google Meet, a network of AI agents for businesses called 'Project Mariner', a new video generator called 'Flow' that can also create matching...