It's a race. It's a race to develop these systems. Is that why you came back to Google?
I mean, I think as a computer scientist, it's a very unique time in history. Honestly, anybody who's a computer scientist should not be retiring right now; they should be working on AI. That's what I would just say. There's just never been a greater problem and opportunity, a greater cusp of technology. So I wouldn't say it's because of the race, although we fully intend that Gemini will be the very first AGI. But to be immersed in this incredible technological revolution, it's unlike anything. I went through the web 1.0 thing, it was very exciting, we had mobile, we had this and that. But I think this is scientifically far more exciting, and I think ultimately the impact on the world is going to be even greater. As much as the web and mobile phones have had a lot of impact, I think AI is going to be vastly more transformative.
So what do you do day-to-day?
I think I torture people like Demis, who's amazing by the way. He tolerated me crashing this fireside. I'm across the street pretty much every day. They're working on the key Gemini text models, on the pre-training, on the post-training, mostly those. I periodically delve into some of the multimodal work, V3 as you've all seen. But I tend to be pretty deep in the technical details, and that's a luxury I really enjoy, fortunately because guys like Demis are minding the shop. That's just where my scientific interest is, deep in the algorithms and how they can evolve.
Okay, let's talk about the products a little bit, some that were introduced recently. I just want to ask you a broad question about agents, Demis, because when I look at other tech companies building agents, what we see in the demos is usually something that's contextually aware, has a disembodied voice, is often interacted with on a screen. When I see DeepMind and Google demos, oftentimes it's through the camera, it's very visual. There was an announcement about smart glasses today. So talk a little bit about if that's the right read, why Google is so interested in having an assistant or companion that sees the world as you see it.
Well, it's for several reasons, several threads come together. As we talked earlier, we've always been interested in agents. That's actually the heritage of DeepMind. We started with agent-based systems in games. We are trying to build AGI, which is a full general intelligence. Clearly that would have to understand the physical environment, the physical world around you. And two of the massive use cases for that, in my opinion, are a truly useful assistant that can come around with you in your daily life, not just stuck on your computer or one device. It needs to be useful in your everyday life for everything, so it needs to come around you and understand your physical context. And then the other big thing is I've always felt for robotics to work, you sort of want what you saw with Astra on a robot. I've always felt that the bottleneck in robotics isn't so much the hardware, although obviously there are many companies working on fantastic hardware and we partner with a lot of them, but it's actually the software intelligence that I think is always what's held robotics back. But I think we're in a really exciting moment now where finally, with these latest versions, especially 2.5 Gemini and more things that we're going to bring, this kind of VEO technology and other things, I think we're going to have really exciting algorithms to make robotics finally work and realize its potential, which could be enormous. And then in the end, AGI needs to be able to do all of those things. That's why you can see we always had this in mind. That's why Gemini was built from the beginning, even the earliest versions, to be multimodal, and that made it harder at the start because it's harder to make things multimodal than just text only. But in the end, I think we're reaping the benefits of those decisions now. I see many of the Gemini team here in the front row. They were the correct decisions we made. They were the harder decisions, but we made the right decisions, and now you can see the fruits of that with all of what you've seen today.
Actually, Sergey, I've been thinking about whether to ask you a Google Glass question. Oh, far away. What did you learn from Glass that Google might be able to apply today, now that it seems like smart glasses have made a reappearance?
Wow. Yeah, great question. I learned a lot. I mean, that was... I definitely feel like I made a lot of mistakes with Google Glass, I'll be honest. I am still a big believer in the form factor, so I'm glad that we have it now. And now it looks like normal glasses, doesn't have the thing in front. I think there was a technology gap, honestly. Now in the AI world, the things that these glasses can do to help you out without constantly distracting you, that capability is much higher. There's also just... I just didn't know anything about consumer electronics supply chains, really, and how hard it would be to build that and have it be at a reasonable price point, managing all the manufacturing and so forth. This time we have great partners that are helping us build this, so that's another step forward. What else can I say? I do have to say I miss the airship with the wings, suiting skydivers for the demo. Honestly, it would have been even cooler here at Shoreline Amphitheater than it was up at Moscone back in the day. But maybe we should polish the product first this time, make it ready and available, and then we'll do a really cool demo. So that's probably a smart move.
Yeah. What I will say is, look, we've got an incredible history of glass devices and smart devices, so we can bring all those learnings to today and are very excited about our new glasses as you saw. But what I'm always talking to our team and Sham and the team about is that, I don't know if Sergey would agree, but I feel like the universal assistant is the killer app for smart glasses, and I think that's what's going to make it work. Apart from the fact that the hardware technology has also moved on and improved a lot, I feel like this is the actual killer app, the natural killer app for it.
