Nostr Web Client

Scoop: Google Assistant to get an AI makeover

https://www.axios.com/2023/07/31/google-assistant-artificial-intelligence-news

Subject: Assistant vision and team changes

Hi team,

Since we launched Assistant seven years ago, we've built great experiences for the hundreds of millions of people who use it every month. And we've heard people's strong desire for assistive, conversational technology that can improve their lives.

As a team, we need to focus on delivering high-quality, critical product experiences for our users. We've also seen the profound potential of generative AI to transform people's lives and see a huge opportunity to explore what a supercharged Assistant, powered by the latest LLM technology, would look like. (A portion of the team has already started working on this, beginning with mobile.)

To do both of these things with speed and focus, we are making some changes in the organization:

We're combining the Services and Surfaces teams, which will be led by Unni and Bryant.

The Mobile team will operate separately under Minni and Zaheed.

The NLP team will now be led by Xiaonan and Lisa. Sincere thank-you to Michelle, who — on top of her day job leading infrastructure — stewarded the NLP team over the past 4 months. Michelle will now lead infrastructure at 100% capacity.

Speech will continue supporting Assistant and other products, and Françoise will now report to Sissie.

As part of this update, we are also eliminating a small number of roles within the team. We have already let these teammates know and we will provide dedicated support to help them through this transition. Everyone impacted will have a minimum of 60 day internal search period, based on local requirements. These have been incredibly difficult decisions, so please support teammates who are processing this news.

Duke and I will host a town hall tomorrow to go through the org changes in more detail and take your questions. (We know tomorrow is a holiday in Zurich, so we'll also host an EMEA-friendly option on Wednesday.) Some teams will host town halls next week — stay tuned for those calendar invitations. We remain deeply committed to Assistant and we are optimistic about its bright future ahead.

Thanks,

Peeyush and Duke

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

stacktoshi 🚀 ∞/21m 2y ago

I can’t wait for the day we all look back on Alexa, Siri’s and Google and have a good laugh.

We need to start building a billion of these assistants so that day can come much sooner

Hazey 2y ago

Yes

Enki 2y ago

I kinda want to look into self hostable assistants.

Derek Ross 2y ago

Sames.

Enki 2y ago

Here is something from my bookmarks. Havent taken the time to dive deep yet but this is where im gonna start.

nostr:nevent1qqspu3lmgljx9wyhkqp9k8jw2huphyy4thzmzch7zg9kyyfffe8xtdcppemhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mp0qgszg7tnjk2w6kqz49ns8edgwz63tkvxnqj8ffclatscp68vl73s93srqsqqqqqpxyd8c8

Derek Ross 2y ago

Thank you. I was actually looking at Willow the other day.

jascha 2y ago

This is the biggest potential impact. Linking to APIs is a game changer.

nostr:nevent1qqs8fy2rlhh3hm5c0yawy85yv96tgug7lf92h9enmleh3484a7zx6fcpzdmhxue69uhhyetvv9ukzcnvv5hx7un8qgszg7tnjk2w6kqz49ns8edgwz63tkvxnqj8ffclatscp68vl73s93srqsqqqqqpr0zmwc

Hazey 2y ago

I want an AI that is based. None of this regurgitating mainstream propaganda talking points AI's, even the uncensored models do that because that's what they're trained on.

I trained a llama-7b-hf model on the last 8 years of my tweets and likes, but it created garble. Work in progress.

Hazey 2y ago

I will never use Google

Leafophonist 2y ago

How will you do that?

Hazey 2y ago

Haven't used Google for anything in years. The most challenging part is keeping their creepy cookies and scripts like googletagmanager out of my browser. Also, admittedly my build process makes connections to them for Android/flutter/go development.