Google's new Project Astra could be generative AI's killer app
Google DeepMind has announced an impressive grab bag of new products and prototypes that may just let it seize back its lead in the race to turn generative artificial intelligence into a mass-market concern.
Top billing goes to Gemini 2.0 -- the latest iteration of Google DeepMind's family of multimodal large language models, now redesigned around the ability to control agents -- and a new version of Project Astra, the experimental everything app that the company teased at Google I/O in May.
The margins between top-end models like Gemini 2.0 and those from rival labs like OpenAI and Anthropic are now slim. These days, advances in large language models are less about how good they are and more about what you can do with them. And that's where agents come in.
MIT Technology Review got to try out Astra in a closed-door live demo last week. It gave us a hint at what's to come. Find out more in the full story.