MIT Technology Review got to try out Astra in a closed-door live demo last week. It was a stunning experience, but there's a gulf between polished promo and live demo. Astra uses Gemini 2.0's built-in agent framework to answer questions and carry out tasks via text, speech, image, and video, calling up existing Google apps like Search, Maps, and Lens when it needs to. "It's merging together some of the most powerful information retrieval systems of our time," says Bibo Xu, product manager for Astra. Gemini 2.0 and Astra are joined by Mariner, a new agent built on top of Gemini that can browse the web for you; Jules, a new Gemini-powered coding assistant; and Gemini for Games, an experimental assistant that you can chat to and ask for tips as you play video games.

Because we in Silicon Valley are newness junkies, it can feel like an act of sabotage to have memories, but, for better or worse, I have them. It's been more than forty years since I co-founded the first company to make headsets and software for simulated experiences, and came up with familiar terms like virtual and mixed reality. Since then, virtual reality has flooded the public imagination in waves; back in the nineteen-eighties, for instance, it had quite a presence in movies, cartoons, TV shows, the occasional arcade game, and a few early consumer products, like the Nintendo Power Glove. I still love V.R. But, these days, I sense that what I experience of it, what I enjoy in it, is different from what it has come to mean to many enthusiasts. Back then, at the beginning, did I talk about V.R. like the people I disagree with now? I did occasionally promote V.R. as an alternate cosmos that might swallow us all to good effect. I don't agree with that sort of talk now, but at the time the joy of being edgy and extreme was too great to resist.

Microsoft 365 Copilot's AI tools don't seem particularly surprising for the company who originated Clippy's helper bot. But applying AI and natural language to Microsoft Office feels like a profound, fundamental change that could absolutely transform the way you work. Microsoft 365 Copilot essentially injects AI into the various Office apps. You'll still interact with them the way you normally would, but Copilot will also live in the toolbar atop those apps, and you'll interact with it in a sidebar. If you've ever hauled a coworker over and told them, "Show me how to do this," you'll understand what Microsoft 365 Copilot can do. Except it will actually, you know, do it.

Humans are good at analyzing things. Machines can analyze a set of data and find patterns in it for a multitude of use cases, whether it's fraud or spam detection, forecasting the ETA of your delivery or predicting which TikTok video to show you next. They are getting smarter at these tasks. This is called "Analytical AI," or traditional AI. But humans are not only good at analyzing things--we are also good at creating.

Microsoft's US$75 billion (£55 billion) acquisition of Activision Blizzard has landed – true to Call of Duty vernacular – "like a bomb" on the US$200 billion revenue video games industry. It heavily arms the Xbox giant for its vision of the metaverse, in which gaming is the marketing adrenaline of this much-touted online future that is to be experienced immersively through virtual reality (VR) headsets or augmented-reality (AR) glasses. The stock market knocked US$10 billion off Playstation maker Sony's valuation on the news. The metaverse was also a big noise at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, branded "tech's hottest trend" by Variety magazine. Product launches included Samsung's new VR world My House, offering virtual home makeovers; and US beauty tech group Perfect Corp's AR-driven virtual beauty makeover range, which lets people experiment with cosmetics and accessories using AR.

Manufacturing has a very broad set of use cases for artificial intelligence including predictive maintenance, quality control, price forecasting, and more. The potential of artificial intelligence in manufacturing is so limitless that it's difficult to know where to start. AI is used to perform manufacturing and quality control, and can shorten design time, reduce materials waste, improve production and perform predictive maintenance. The power of artificial intelligence is explored in a recent eBook, published by Sinequa, which explores the obstacles to fully leveraging AI in manufacturing, and steps to overcome them. "It's like having a Lego set. Rather than having to build a house from scratch, you're now building a house out of a Lego set which is a lot easier."

Artificial intelligence (AI) is used in a wide variety of products and services, including maps embedded on our smart phones and "chat bots" that help answer our questions on websites. Many hope that AI will transform our economy in ways that drive growth, similar to how steam engines did in the late 19th century and electricity did in the early 20th century. But it is hard to imagine that maps on smart phones, chatbots, and other existing AI-enabled services will drive the type of economic growth we saw from stream and electricity. What we need to see are some dramatic new AI-enabled products and services that transform our way of life--in short, we are waiting for an AI "killer app." Autonomous vehicles (AVs)--vehicles that accelerate, brake, and turn on their own, requiring little or no input from a human driver--may be such a killer app that transforms our economy significantly.

When the Federal Communication Commission asked the public what it thought about its net neutrality rules in 2017, the comments flooded in--including millions submitted under fake names by bot-comment-generators. These missives added no value and raised concerns that people's identities were being stolen. Now everyone from Congressional Republicans to the New York State Attorney General have their sights set on shutting down the bots. But anxiety about the risks of computer-generated comments might go too far. We don't want to allow overblown fears to squelch the development of future killer apps that could improve public participation in regulatory decision making.

Facebook took major steps to announce its all out committment to Chatbots. The first is a a chatbot training ground called ParlAI--a play on words which stems from its primarily French-speaking researchers. Moreover, Facebook is sharing ParlAI with the world as an open source tool. Facebook is offering the training software so that developers and researchers can use it to train their chatbot "agents."

In a far-reaching and candid interview after IBM's #THINK2020 digital event, Rob and I discussed his insights into what's happening with AI in the enterprise and where the biggest long-term impacts will be. Editorial comments are set off by square brackets [such as these.] There's one word that describes what I'm seeking here: insight. I am seeking your insights. I've looked at your blog posts and reviews of your books. You have insights I want to share with all The Analyst Syndicate's readers. Let's start with insights on business model disruption in particular industries.