According to TechCrunch, Google will not release technology from Project Astra, its initiative to develop AI applications and agents for real-time, multimodal understanding, until at least next year. Google CEO Sundar Pichai disclosed this timeline during the company's Q3 earnings call on Tuesday. He mentioned that Google is working on creating experiences where AI can perceive and reason about the world, with Project Astra being a preview of that future. The company aims to launch such experiences by 2025.
Project Astra, which was showcased at Google's I/O developer conference in May 2024, includes various technologies. These range from smartphone apps that can recognize their surroundings and answer related questions to AI assistants capable of performing tasks on behalf of users. During a prerecorded demo at I/O, Google demonstrated a Project Astra prototype that could answer questions about objects within the view of a smartphone's camera, such as identifying a neighborhood or naming a part on a broken bicycle.
Earlier this month, The Information reported that Google planned to introduce a consumer-focused agent experience as early as December, which could handle tasks like purchasing products and booking flights. However, this now appears unlikely unless the experience is separate from Project Astra. Meanwhile, Anthropic has become one of the first companies to develop a large generative AI model capable of controlling apps and web browsers on a PC, though it still faces challenges with many basic tasks.