FROM OUR REPORTER
MOUNTAIN VIEW – If The devil wears Prada was set today, in AI was as defined by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, the possibility that Miranda Prestley decides to replace the pair of assistants Emily and Andy with AI wouldn’t be that remote. Of course, all the empathy, human intuition would be missing (do you remember Andy’s genius in managing to find the perfect contact to recover the unobtainable Harry Potter manuscript for the Runaway director’s daughters?) and the ability to manage situations unexpected with creativity. But seeing the (impressive) demo of «Project Astra», the AI agent presented by Mountain View at Google I/O, what comes to mind is that it would be excellently capable of helping us manage an agenda, reminding us where we left our sunglasses before leaving the office , answer virtually any question.
But what can Astra do? The video shown at I/O is especially striking for its responsiveness of the AI agent from Mountain View: fast, with a tone very similar to that of a human being, and precise. Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind, swore that the video was shot in real time and there is no direction or manipulation behind the rendering of the film and that is precisely what makes it so incredible. The demo is shot at London and shows a Google employee framing the view from the window, asking the assistant if he recognizes the neighborhood they are in. Astra immediately identifies the King’s Cross area, citing its popular station and the importance of that hub for public transport links. And it also recognizes objects in the surrounding space, such as a chest, and can describe their details, remember where he had seen the glasses of the owner of the phone (the choice of glasses is not random) and tell her where she can get them on the desk.
In the second part of the demo the shot changes and the camera of the glasses records the video, a prototype of smart glasses on which Google’s AR team is working. And here too, Astra interacts by answering those questions through the glasses. What is shown in the video is a way to «anticipate that the capabilities shown with Project Astra could be used with wearable products such as smart glasses». «Generative AI is part of smartphone technology, but comes to life in a format like that of glasses – he says Sundar Pichai, number one at Google, answering questions from a selected audience of journalists -. We’ve always had an eye for that and I think that’s part of what we’re showing. I think, as a company, we are deeply committed to being on the cutting edge of computing as it evolves beyond smartphones. Here, we are investing in it.” Google says that at the moment “there is no planned launch”.
Astra has also been called «Big G’s answer to Open Ai», which just the day before the Mountain View event launched Gpt-4o, a new interface for ChatGpt capable of quickly conversing with the voice and talking about what is seen through the camera of a smartphone or on a computer screen , with a response capacity (also in this case) very similar to that of a human being. In short, will the new AI challenge be played on personal assistants and their ability to give us support and establish a connection with us as if they were real people? What has happened in the tech world in recent days might lead us to think like this. On the other hand, already after the launch of Open AI, CEO Sam Altman himself had mentioned a very direct parallel, the one with the 2013 film Her in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with the AI assistant he talks to (voice is Scarlett Johansson). «We should prepare for the possibility of this happening – said Pichai responding to journalists -. I believe that with such powerful technology at our disposal, over time we will have people who will enter into deep relationships with these AIs and these assistants. I think that’s why we want to approach technology responsibly.” We just have to wait to see the developments of widespread and widespread use of these tools: Astra will in fact arrive in the Gemini app and in the web experience by the end of the year.
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