Google has pulled its AI Test Kitchen app from the Play Store and the App Store to focus solely on the web platform.
The company launched the AI Test Kitchen experience last year to let users interact with projects powered by different AI models such as LaMDA 2. The first set of experiments included the model breaking down a goal into different subsets and talking about dogs to check if the system sticks to the topic.
Google confirmed the move to 9to5Google, which first noted the apps being pulled, and said that AI Test Kitchen will focus on just the web experience as it is easy to push updates on just one platform.
Last November, Google announced “Season 2” of the AI Test Kitchen with new experiments. But they were never rolled out. Currently, the Test Kitchen hosts only a solitary text-to-music language model experiment called MusicLM, which was announced earlier this year at Google IO.This move is not very surprising given Google has a habit of shutting down apps and experiments without prior notice. Plus, given the rise of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI-focused tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthtropic’s Claude, the company might want to focus more on testing features for its consumer products.
In May, during Google IO, the company announced a new portal called Google Labs, which allows users to sign up for generative AI-based experiments. Notably, this page also lists the aforementioned MusicLM experiment.
It’s on-brand for Google to make things confusing by having multiple products for AI experiments. Now, we have an AI Test Kitchen page with one experiment. A Google Labs page shows different projects like Search Labs, the company’s AI-powered note-taking project NotebookLM, AI-focused Workspace features, along with the MusicLM project.
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