Google rolls out faster Gemini AI model to power agents
Washington: Google debuted a new version of its flagship artificial intelligence model that it said is twice as fast as its previous version and will power virtual agents that assist users, Bloomberg reported.
The new model, Gemini 2.0, can generate images and audio across languages, and can assist during Google searches and coding projects, the company said Wednesday. The new capabilities of Gemini “make it possible to build agents that can think, remember, plan, and even take action on your behalf,” said Tulsee Doshi, a director of product management at the company, in a briefing with reporters.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google has been working to ensure that the latest wave of AI tools pushed by OpenAI and other startups do not loosen its hold on search and advertising. The company has so far held onto its market share in search, but OpenAI is weaving more search features into ChatGPT, putting pressure on the industry leader. Both companies’ ultimate aim is to build artificial general intelligence, or software that can perform tasks as well or better than humans.
“We want to build that technology — that is where the real value is,” Koray Kavukcuoglu, chief technology officer of AI lab Google DeepMind, said in an interview. “And on the path to that, what we are trying to do is try to pick the right applications, try to pick the right problems to solve.”
Beyond experimental products, Google incorporated more AI into its search engine, which remains its lifeblood. The company said that this week it would begin testing Gemini 2.0 in search and in AI Overviews, the artificial intelligence-powered summaries displayed at the top of Google search. That will improve the speed and quality of search results for increasingly complex questions, like advanced math equations. The company on Wednesday also gave developers access to an experimental version of Gemini 2.0 Flash, its speedy and efficient AI model, which Google said could better process images and approximate the human ability to reason.
Google debuted a new web feature called “deep research,” which it says will enable Gemini users to use AI to dive into topics with detailed reports. The feature, billed as an AI-powered research assistant, will be available Wednesday to users of Gemini Advanced, Google’s paid AI subscription product. Meanwhile, Gemini users worldwide will be able to tap into a chat-optimized version of the experimental Gemini 2.0 Flash on the web, the company said. The model will come to more Google products in the new year.
The products featured on Wednesday show how Google’s premier AI lab, Google DeepMind, is playing a more pivotal role in product development. The lab is expanding tests of Project Astra, an AI agent that uses a smartphone camera to process visual input. In an elaborate space evoking a home library, with towering bookshelves containing titles on computer programming and travel, Google employees showed how Astra can summarize information on the page. A hidden door nestled in the shelves revealed a small art gallery, where the agent reflected on how Norwegian painter Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” captured his own anxiety and the general paranoia of
his age.
