A Day at Google

I was at Google’s headquarters (The “Googleplex”) in Mountain View, California last month for the Imagination in Action conference. There is plenty I could write about—a Distinguished Researcher at DeepMind who talked about how we’ll learn to use agents over time; a leader from the non-profit sector saying that she’s done hearing pitches from companies that wrapped a piece of software around an LLM to make it “non-profit-friendly” asking for $10 million; or the tech CEO who, when asked about mentoring said, “if you want to get promoted, do real work.”But I want to focus on a very brief comment—almost a throwaway line—I heard from a leader in Google’s Gemini program. He talked about how he’s using Gemini as an “ambient companion” while doing things like playing video games. Gemini shadows him as he plays. When he gets to a place in the game where he has to perform repetitive tasks, he can say, “Gemini, would you take over here and level-grind for a bit?”Gemini is just sort of there, alongside him, prepared to takeover when he gets bored, or disinterested, or a higher priority task comes up.This line is the kicker. He said, “I can’t tell yet if it’s important or creepy, but I’m playing around with it.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chapainsights.substack.com/subscribe