MIT Expertise Evaluation bought to check out Astra in a closed-door reside demo final week. It was a surprising expertise, however there’s a gulf between polished promo and reside demo.
Astra makes use of Gemini 2.0’s built-in agent framework to reply questions and perform duties by way of textual content, speech, picture, and video, calling up current Google apps like Search, Maps, and Lens when it must. “It’s merging collectively a few of the strongest info retrieval methods of our time,” says Bibo Xu, product supervisor for Astra.
Gemini 2.0 and Astra are joined by Mariner, a brand new agent constructed on high of Gemini that may browse the net for you; Jules, a brand new Gemini-powered coding assistant; and Gemini for Video games, an experimental assistant that you would be able to chat to and ask for ideas as you play video video games.
(And let’s not overlook that within the final week Google DeepMind additionally introduced Veo, a brand new video era mannequin; Imagen 3, a brand new model of its picture era mannequin; and Willow, a brand new sort of chip for quantum computer systems. Whew. In the meantime, CEO Demis Hassabis was in Sweden yesterday receiving his Nobel Prize.)
Google DeepMind claims that Gemini 2.0 is twice as quick because the earlier model, Gemini 1.5, and outperforms it on a variety of customary benchmarks, together with MMLU-Professional, a big set of multiple-choice questions designed to check the skills of huge language fashions throughout a variety of topics, from math and physics to well being, psychology, and philosophy.
However the margins between top-end fashions like Gemini 2.0 and people from rival labs like OpenAI and Anthropic at the moment are slim. As of late, advances in massive language fashions are much less about how good they’re and extra about what you are able to do with them.
And that’s the place brokers are available in.
Arms on with Mission Astra
Final week I used to be taken by an unmarked door on an higher ground of a constructing in London’s King’s Cross district right into a room with sturdy secret-project vibes. The phrase “ASTRA” was emblazoned in big letters throughout one wall. Xu’s canine, Charlie, the venture’s de facto mascot, roamed between desks the place researchers and engineers have been busy constructing a product that Google is betting its future on.
