Google Gemini 2 comes with an AI agent that can browse the web for me, Project Mariner, but I already have privacy questions about it.

A new version of Google’s flagship AI model shows how the company sees AI transforming personal computing, web search, and perhaps the way people interact with the physical world.

Google is also investing in video games and AI in another way: creating playable virtual worlds on the fly from a prompt image using a “foundation world model” called Genie 2 that it showed off last week. That work seems early, too: Genie 2 can only generate consistent worlds for “up to a minute,” Google says.

Google says its new generation of AI models can understand more of the world and take action on your behalf.

The battle for AI supremacy is heating up. Almost exactly a week after OpenAI made its o1 model available to the public, Google today is offering a preview of its next-generation Gemini 2.0 model. In a blog post attributed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai,

Project Astra, which was shown off at Google I/O earlier this year, is a major leap in Google's AI research from its DeepMind team in London. Like the video from earlier this year

Gemini 2.0 can generate images and audio, is faster and cheaper to run, and is meant to make AI agents possible.