No matter what your profession is – musician, teacher, doctor, lawyer, sales or marketing specialist, coach or director – the path to working more efficiently now runs through artificial intelligence.

Silicon Valley is at the heart of a fierce competition for AI supremacy, with OpenAI and Google showcasing their latest AI models and tools to developers and users through back-to-back demos, signaling a new era of productivity and efficiency driven by AI technologies.

While the suite of options announced by Google might be confusing, they provide developers with powerful choices.

Google is offering its personalized AI assistant, Gemini, to software developers and professionals who want to perform their tasks more efficiently.

The multimodal Gemini 1.5 Pro model brings significant innovations in visual recognition. For example, you can take a photo of a dish at your favorite restaurant and request the recipe. Or you can take a picture of a math problem you can't solve and get step-by-step instructions on how to solve it.

All of this requires just a single image.

The newest model in the Gemini family, 1.5 Flash, is the fastest among those used with API and is designed for high-volume and high-frequency tasks at scale. It is more cost-efficient and operates effectively with a long context window.

Magic demos

While much of the discourse around AI focuses on demo performances, the real competition lies in achieving accuracy, speed and cost-effectiveness.

OpenAI garnered attention with its demo of GPT-4o on Monday.

GPT-4o, capable of making jokes, translating, engaging in human-like conversations and providing responses tailored to the context, showcased examples of real-time work throughout the demo. The ability to replicate this success rate in applications has become more critical for software developers.

The following day, Google, while announcing its AI tools, chose to focus on its own products.

The magical demo part was shown only with a DeepMind example in a video shot at its London office.

Instead of directly responding to its competitors, Google focused on the tools that would highlight its own strengths. In other words, it did not change its agenda to counter its rival.

Faster and deeper analysis

Google offers Gemini to institutions or users who need a more powerful personal AI assistant, with the ability to perform faster processing and stronger analysis. Whether used in an application or web experience, it handles complex tasks.

By feeding it with your personal data, it provides you with more powerful and consistent personalized analyses for collaboration. Therefore, by feeding the assistant with your personal data from Google Drive or other sources, you ensure more personalized and accurate results.

Google's latest model, Gemini 1.5 Pro, is available to Gemini Advanced subscribers.

Featuring the longest context window among open-to-end-user chatbots, Gemini 1.5 Pro introduces the latest technical innovations, including an extended context window starting with 1 million tokens.

This means Gemini Advanced can comprehend multiple large documents totaling up to 1,500 pages or summarize 100 emails. Soon, it will be able to process one-hour video content or codebases with more than 30,000 lines.

1.5 Flash performs at a high level in tasks such as summarization, chat applications, converting images and videos to text, extracting data from long documents and tables, and many similar tasks.

Data privacy matters

For stronger personalized analyses, the ability to upload files to Gemini Advanced via Google Drive or directly from your device can be added.

Gemini can handle tasks such as examining complex documents for details of the pet policy in your rental agreement or comparing the main arguments of multiple long research papers.

Soon, Gemini Advanced will instantly reveal insights from uploaded data files like spreadsheets and create custom visualizations, acting as a data analyst. Gemini emphasizes that it is designed to protect the privacy of your files and conversations related to your files. These files are not used to train their models.

Create your personal assistant

Gemini Advanced subscribers will soon be able to create personal versions of Gemini called Gems, such as a gym buddy, cooking assistant, coding partner or creative writing guide.

The setup is extremely easy. Simply explain what you want your Gem to do and how you want it to respond.

For example, "As my running coach, create a daily running plan for me and be positive, optimistic and motivational." Gemini takes these instructions and, with a single click, develops them into a Gem that meets your specific needs.

Investor focus shifts toward artificial intelligence ventures

Venture funds targeting artificial intelligence startups saw an increase in the first quarter of this year compared to the fourth quarter of 2023, according to data from Crunchbase.

In the January-March period, a total of $12.2 billion was invested in AI-backed ventures through 1,166 deals, the data showed.

This figure marks a modest 4% increase from the previous quarter, where $11.7 billion was invested in similar ventures across 1,072 deals.

However, it represents a 25% decrease from the first quarter of last year, which witnessed investments totaling $16.3 billion.

Notably, this quarter included the epic tour de force that saw ChatGPT-maker OpenAI raise more than $10 billion from Microsoft, marking the largest of several significant funding rounds from last year.

Türk Telekom also favoring AI

Muhammed Özhan, the general manager of Türk Telekom Ventures, the venture capital arm of Türk Telekom, one of Türkiye's leading telecommunications and technology companies, emphasized the significance of entrepreneurship within their corporate culture.

"Entrepreneurship stands as one of the foremost values of our corporate culture. As a company that has laid milestones in Türkiye's communication history, we recognize entrepreneurship as the key to economic and technological advancement and act accordingly," Özhan noted.

He highlighted Türk Telekom's contributions to the entrepreneurial ecosystem, citing their support for ventures in various fields ranging from biotech to education, artificial intelligence, image processing and big data solutions.

"Since 2013, with Türkiye's first corporate venture acceleration program, Pilot, we have provided cash support of TL 32 million to 111 ventures and transferred Türk Telekom's invaluable technology accumulation," Özhan added.

"With Türk Telekom Ventures, since 2018, we have been investing in ventures that offer innovative ideas in technologies shaping the future. The portfolio value of ventures we have invested in with Türk Telekom Ventures has reached $190 million," he noted.

"We lead the way in bridging our domestic ventures to the world, contributing to our country's vision of becoming a technology-producing and exporting nation. We are determined to carry innovative ideas into the future by supporting the local ecosystem."

It is impossible to determine whether recent layoffs indicate a slowdown in AI. However, such actions may stem from the inability to secure stable funding. Nevertheless, given last year's surge, it seems unlikely that investors will cease to open their checkbooks for AI-related technologies anytime soon.

Next-generation technologies drive customer surge

Akbank LAB, the innovation center responsible for Turkish private lender Akbank's innovation and transformation, has been generating tangible outcomes in open innovation and corporate entrepreneurship since 2016.

Burcu Civelek Yüce, deputy general manager of Akbank, attributes the recent increase in customers, predominantly through digital channels, to the artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT) and next-generation payment technologies cultivated in the Akbank LAB.

"We engage with nearly 1,000 ecosystem players each year. In 2023 alone, we held discussions with over 700 technology ventures," stated Yüce. "We have executed close to 40 projects with technology ventures from diverse geographies such as Singapore, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain and Türkiye. Sixteen of these projects have been successfully completed and launched, with three more slated for launch in the near future."

Among these projects, she cited initiatives like the Blockchain-Based Foreign Trade Platform (We.trade), Digital Asset Custody (Taurus/Metaco), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Business Finance Management (BFM) tool for AI-based financial management for businesses.

Digital assets

As part of a collaboration with Togg, the manufacturer of Türkiye's first electric vehicle brand, Yüce said they conducted groundbreaking blockchain user scenario studies that will enable the use of Togg smart devices as digital assets through the tokenization of real-world assets.

"Using the 'Tokenization' technology developed with smart contracts over the blockchain, it will be possible to create and store digital assets representing ownership of smart devices, making them shareable. These developments will, in the long term and to the extent permitted by relevant regulations, pave the way for secure payments in used car sales, pay-as-you-use payments, car rentals, easy credit and many other financial services," she noted.

Productive AI solutions

Highlighting their productive AI solutions, Yüce said, to date, they have executed close to 40 projects with technology ventures from diverse geographies such as Singapore, the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, Spain and Türkiye.

"Sixteen of these projects have been successfully completed and launched, with three more slated for launch in the near future. We place significant importance on productive AI and the projects we undertake in this vertical. These projects range from accelerating and supporting our internal processes within the bank to initiatives that we will introduce to our customers," she added.