MIT Know-how Evaluate I used to be in a position to check out Astra in a reside demo behind closed doorways final week. It was a powerful expertise, however there is a chasm between a refined promo and a reside demo.
Astra makes use of Gemini 2.0’s built-in agent framework to reply questions and carry out duties through textual content, voice, photographs and video, calling up current Google apps like Search, Maps and Lens when vital. “It is about merging among the strongest info retrieval techniques of our time,” says Bibo Xu, product supervisor at 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 coding assistant powered by Gemini; and Gemini for Video games, an experimental assistant you possibly can chat with and ask for recommendation whereas enjoying video video games.
(And let’s not neglect that within the final week Google DeepMind additionally introduced I seea brand new video technology mannequin; Picture 3a brand new model of its picture technology mannequin; and Willowa brand new kind of chip for quantum computer systems. Phew. In the meantime, the CEO Demis Hassabis He 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 number of commonplace benchmarks, together with MMLU-Professional, a big set of multiple-choice questions designed to check the capabilities of enormous fashions. of language. in quite a lot of topics, from arithmetic and physics to well being, psychology and philosophy.
However the margins between high-end fashions like Gemini 2.0 and people from rival labs like OpenAI and Anthropic are actually slim. At this time, advances in giant language fashions have much less to do with how good they’re and extra to do with what you are able to do with them.
And that is the place brokers are available in.
Let’s get to work with the Astra Venture
Final week I used to be led by way of an nameless door on the highest ground of a constructing within the King’s Cross district of London to a room with robust secret undertaking vibes. The phrase “ASTRA” was emblazoned in large letters on a wall. Xu’s canine, Charlie, the one from the undertaking. de facto mascotHe wandered between desks the place researchers and engineers had been busy constructing a product that Google is betting its future on.
