Most people will remember Sergey Brin for his famous (and daring) demo of Google Glass during the company's I/O developer conference in 2012. After 12 years, the co-founder of Google is back at I/O, but to talk about other things … in a way.
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After the opening day keynote, in a fairly intense question-and-answer session with members of the press, Byrne shared his thoughts on Project Astra, Gemini Pro 1.5, and his first-ever use case with AI.
Project Astra, Google's multimodal vision of “intelligent systems that demonstrate reasoning, planning and memory,” was the most exciting AI announcement during the day's two-hour keynote. Naming, very likeable. Project Starline, says it all. Fittingly, the conversational technology was demoed with a camera app on a phone and a pair of smart glasses.
“It's funny because it's like the perfect piece of hardware,” Brin replied when asked about Project Astra and how its potential wearable form factor compares to the decade-old Google Glass. “It's like the killer app now, 10 years later,” added the Google co-founder.
Also: Meet Gemini Live: Like Facetiming with a friend who knows everything.
While the rise and fall of Google Glass is a story in itself, the product vision has made a dramatic comeback in recent years thanks to AI and the quest to find the best hardware to match — whether it's Glass, Lapel pin, or orange square. Bern's preference? Something that is hands-free, wearable and no A phone
Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses feature multimodal AI capabilities for image-based queries.
Carrie Vaughan/ZDNET
Besides hardware, what really excites Brin — and was the main reason he returned to Google after retiring in 2019 — is AI. Since rejoining the company in 2023, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, Brin has been integral to developing Google AI products like Gemini, which serves as the general model backbone of various Google devices and services. Spreading.
Also: 3 new Gemini Advanced features unveiled at Google I/O 2024
At this year's I/O, Google unveiled an updated Gemini Pro 1.5 model, capable of providing up to 2 million tokens (over a million) for longer conversations and processing large-sized documents. . The most impressive part, for Byrne, is the generality of the AI model, being able to draw summaries from multiple Gmail messages to coding, the co-founder's favorite AI use case.
“Being a computer scientist, I want to be a part of that (AI),” Byrne said. “I can't imagine a better time to be a computer scientist.”