In 2016, Google Assistant was announced as “your own personal Google,” and Sundar Pichai believes it has the AI “technology to actually do those things now.” The Google CEO was interviewed by the New York Times on Bard and the broader state of AI.
Pichai was asked about how Google could differentiate Bard and other future AI products since it has the benefit of handling and knowing other aspects of your digital life, like with Gmail.
The CEO more than acknowledges the integration possibilities and believes the eventual result of that can be a “very, very powerful assistant for you.”
Anybody at work who works with a personal assistant, you know how life changing it is. But now imagine bringing that power in the context of every person’s day-to-day lives. That is a real potential we are talking about here. And so I think it’s very profound.
And so we’re all working on that. And again, we have to get it right. But those are the possibilities. Getting everyone their own personalized model, something that really excites me, in some ways, this is what we envisioned when we were building Google Assistant. But we have the technology to actually do those things now.
At the first Made by Google event in October of 2016, Pichai said Assistant’s “goal is to build a personal Google for each and every user. Just like we built a Google for everyone, we want to build each user his or her own individual Google.”
Later on in the interview, the CEO said that as Google worked on Assistant, it “realized the limitations of, like, approaching the assistant with the underlying technology approach we had, so it wasn’t an accident that what we worked on LaMDA to be a conversational dialogue.”
This comes in the context of Google this week reorganizing the Assistant team to focus on Bard. As we previously reported, Google has tasked that team to work on the AI chatbot, given the crossover between the two efforts. However, in terms of the user-facing impact/benefit of those personnel shifts, Google had nothing to share yet beyond telling us that it’s “committed to building a great Assistant experience for everyone, helping people get things done whether they’re at home, in their cars, or on the go.”
In the short term, Google is focusing on bringing generative AI to Gmail and other Workspace products, like Docs. This includes helping you write, draft emails, and summarize, with public testing beginning just yesterday.
It remains to be seen what Google’s concrete visions for Assistant are, but it’s clear that Google recognizes the obvious synergies with the technology behind AI chat.
Meanwhile, Pichai also shared during the NYT interview that Larry Page and Sergey Brin are “very active as board members,” which is their only official role at Alphabet these days. As of late, “Sergey has been hanging out with our engineers for a while now.”
When asked about the broader impact of generative AI, Pichai expects “there’ll be a lot of societal adaptation.” In the case of coding, he believes “some of the grunt work you’re doing as part of programming is going to get better,” and that’ll make the job of programmers easier. It will also make programming much more accessible, and he expects “we are going to evolve to a more natural language way of programming over time.”
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