Google Reveals Gemini 2, AI Agents, and a Prototype Personal Assistant

Google once only wanted to organize the world's information. Now it seems more intent on shoveling that information into artificial intelligence algorithms that become dutiful, ever-present, and increasingly powerful virtual helpers. Google today announced Gemini 2, a new version of its flagship AI model that has been trained to plan and execute tasks on a user's computers and the web, and which can chat like a person and make sense of the physical world as a virtual butler. "I've dreamed about a universal digital assistant for a long, long time, as a stepping stone on the path to artificial general intelligence," Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind told WIRED ahead of today's announcement, alluding to the idea of AI that can eventually do anything a human brain can. Gemini 2 is primarily another step up in AI's intelligence as measured by different benchmarks used to gauge such things.