Author: openjargon

• Donald Trump's lead attorney Todd Blanche began his cross-examination of Michael Cohen Tuesday.
• Blanche came out of the gate swinging, questioning Cohen about social media posts bashing Trump. 
• "You referred to President Trump as a 'dictator douchebag,' didn't you?" Blanche demanded of Cohen.

Donald Trump's lead attorney Todd Blanche came out of the gate swinging on Tuesday as he began his cross-examination of the former president's ex-lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen.

Blanche grilled Cohen — the prosecution's star witness in Trump's New York criminal hush-money trial — about the many times that Cohen insulted both Trump and himself on social media.

"You referred to President Trump as a 'dictator douchebag,' didn't you?" Blanche said as he questioned Cohen about an April 23 TikTok Cohen made just days after the historic trial began.

Cohen deadpanned from the witness stand, "Sounds like something I would say."

Journalists and members of the public watching the trial on video screens in the court's overflow room erupted in laughter.

Blanche also went after Cohen about him ranting in the recent TikTok video that Trump "belongs in a fucking cage."

"You said, 'he goes back into that little cage, which is where he belongs, in a fucking cage, like an animal.' Did you say that?" Blanche demanded of Cohen, who responded, "I recall saying that."

Cohen's roasts of his former boss were revisited

Just moments into his fiery cross-examination of Cohen, Blanche said, "In fact, on April 23rd, you went on TikTok and called me a crying little shit, didn't you?"

"Sounds like something I would say," Cohen said to an earlier wave of laughter in the downtown Manhattan court's overflow room — a second courtroom in the building where members of the public and press are able to watch the trial on screens.

New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan swiftly sustained an objection from the prosecution, striking the question from the record.

Later in the cross-examination, Blanche brought up more occasions where Cohen roasted Trump. He asked about a T-shirt depicting an illustration of Trump in an orange jumpsuit and behind bars, which Cohen wore on his April 23 TikTok video.

"It's part of the merch store," Cohen said, touting items sold by the MeidasTouch Network, the left-leaning media company where he hosts one of his anti-Trump podcasts.

The website also sells a mug depicting Trump's signature coiffure with the phrase "Send him to the big house, not the White House," as Blanche pointed out to the jury.

Cohen's cross-examination comes after he spent the last day and a half on the witness stand, being questioned by prosecutor Susan Hoffinger.

Cohen testified that Trump was the one who directed him to make a hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in the days before the 2016 election.

Much of his most damning testimony came when he quoted what he described as Trump's own words.

"Just take care of it," Cohen said Trump told him in ordering him to quash Daniels' story about the sex she says she had with Trump.

The Manhattan district attorney's office has charged Trump with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

Prosecutors allege Trump illegally disguised records reimbursing Cohen for a $130,000 hush-money payment made to Daniels ahead of 2016 election.

The payment, prosecutors say, was to buy Daniels' silence over a one-time sexual encounter the porn star says she had with Trump at a Lake Tahoe hotel suite in 2006 during a celebrity golf tournament.

Trump has denied having sex with Daniels.

Prosecutors hope Cohen's testimony will bolster their argument that Trump orchestrated the payment to Daniels as part of an illegal conspiracy to influence the election.

"He wasn't thinking about Melania," Cohen testified of Trump. "This was all about the campaign."

• Russia can't stave off an economic crisis forever, think tank researcher Alexander Kolyandr writes.
• Moscow is becoming more susceptible to major shocks the longer the war goes on.
• "The Kremlin, as a result, is in a three-way bind of its own making," Kolyandr said.

Russia's economy is fragile and policymakers won't be able to stave off a crisis for very long, a think tank researcher argued in a post on Tuesday. 

Alexander Kolyandr, a Russian economy expert and researcher for the Centre for European Policy Analysis, pointed to mounting challenges faced by the Kremlin as its war in Ukraine drags on through its third year. 

Central bankers and policymakers in Russia have so far managed to keep the economy afloat, but their good luck is bound to run out, Kolyandr warned.

"Putin used to know that the economy was best left to professionals. Indeed, the men and women running the country's central bank, finance ministry, and ministry of economic development remain highly skilled and saved the country from economic collapse in 2022," Kolyandr wrote in a recent note. "Two years on, they clearly understand the longer-term impossibility of the task they've been set. The question is, do they dare tell the boss? And if they do, will he listen?"

Russia's economy has flashed key signs of weaknesses since the West first began imposing sanctions on the nation in 2022. Trade restrictions, like a ban on energy imports to Europe and $60-per-barrel price cap on Russian oil, have delivered a major blow to the Kremlin's war chest, with Russia's energy revenue plunging 24% last year. 

Russia is also reeling from the growing costs of its war, in both its finances and its human capital. The nation is now slammed with a severe worker shortage, which has pushed up wages and inflation.

Prices in Russia are growing at a pace of around 8%, double the central bank's official price target. Interest rates have also soared to 16% as policymakers try to stem the inflationary tide, which poses another burden to consumers. 

"The Kremlin, as a result, is in a three-way bind of its own making. The government can't cut spending as long as the war continues. The war, however, saps the labor force, fueling inflation and diminishing both welfare and public sentiment. And high interest rates, necessitated by all that inflation, stifle investment in productivity and further distort the economy," Kolyandr said.

Other experts have noted that Russia faces a dilemma as it juggles managing its economy and prolonging its war against Ukraine. According to one European economist, the nation has become dependent on war for economic growth, and it can't afford to win or lose the war.

• Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is one of the world's highest-paid execs, earning $226 million in 2022.
• Pichai has been at Google since 2004, becoming its CEO in 2015 and Alphabet's CEO in 2019.
• In the role, Pichai has reorganized Google's workforce, issued mass layoffs, and emphasized AI.

Sundar Pichai has had a meteoric rise since joining Google as a 31-year-old product manager in 2004.

In the 11 years that followed his first steps on the Googleplex, Pichai was promoted four times, eventually becoming the CEO of Google in 2015. 

In that role, he was responsible for the company's core businesses and cash cow — and did a good enough job that, in December 2019, he was promoted one more time, replacing Google cofounder Larry Page as the CEO of Alphabet, Google's parent company.

Since then, he has led the almost-$2-trillion company through the pandemic, layoffs, and the AI renaissance that's taken Silicon Valley by storm.

So, who is Pichai, and how did he scale the ranks to get one of the most important jobs at one of the most important companies in the world? Here's his story.

Jillian D'Onfro, Avery Hartmans, and Mary Meisenzahl contributed to an earlier version of this article.

Pichai, whose full name is actually Pichai Sundararajan, grew up in Chennai, India.

Pichai's father was an electrical engineer, and his mother worked as a stenographer before having him and his younger brother. The family wasn't wealthy, and the boys slept together in the living room of their two-room apartment.

Early on, Pichai's family realized he had a talent for remembering numbers after noticing he could recall every phone number he had ever dialed on their rotary phone. He has been known to sometimes show off his memorization skills at meetings, Bloomberg said in 2014. 

After becoming interested in computers — the first software program he wrote was a chess game — Pichai studied engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur. His success there won him a scholarship to Stanford University.

Pichai earned a master's degree from Stanford and later attended the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School for his MBA.

Pichai has said that moving to California was a huge leap.

"I always loved technology growing up," Pichai said in a 2014 interview at Delhi University. "I used to read about what was happening in Silicon Valley, and I wanted to be a part of it."

When Pichai got to America in 1993, he couldn't believe how expensive everything was.

He "was in an absolute state of shock" about the price of a backpack — $60 — he told Bloomberg.

He also missed his girlfriend, Anjali. The two eventually married and now have a son, Kiran, and daughter, Kavya.

Before Google, he had stints at semiconductor manufacturer Applied Materials and consulting firm McKinsey.

Pichai had his first interview at Google on April Fools' Day in 2004 — the same day it launched Gmail.

Pichai has said he initially thought the free email service Gmail was one of Google's famous pranks.

Pichai got his start working as a VP of product management, focused on Google's Toolbar, a web-search feature on Internet Explorer and Firefox.

One of his early achievements: convincing Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin that Google should build its own web browser.

In 2006, Microsoft created a "doomsday" scenario for Google by making Bing the new default search engine on Internet Explorer. To mitigate the effect of this change, Pichai helped convince Google execs to create its own browser, Google Chrome.

Chrome is now the world's most popular browser.

As a leader at Google, Pichai was known to be well-liked and focused on results, which resulted in more responsibility.

Pichai's "substance over overt style" approach was, in part, what led to Pichai taking over the Android division in 2013.

He spearheaded Android One, Google's push to "make high-quality smartphones accessible to as many people as possible," and was also instrumental in ensuring Android was better integrated with Google.

Pichai was also behind Chrome OS, the operating system that powers Google's inexpensive Chromebook laptops, and was reportedly instrumental in helping put together Google's $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest in 2014. 

His success garnered attention, and he was reportedly approached for a leadership role at Twitter.

When Pichai turned down Twitter, he was rewarded for his allegiance, getting $50 million and a promotion.

As he rose through the ranks, Pichai became the right-hand man of Google cofounder and former CEO Larry Page.

"He's like the Aaron to Larry's Moses," a source told Business Insider in 2014, referring to the biblical prophet's brother.

That relationship and his success led to Pichai's next important promotion in late 2014 when Page put him in charge of the company's core products.

After proving himself with Chrome and Android, Pichai added Google+, Maps, Search, commerce and ads, and infrastructure to his portfolio. The move cemented Pichai's move as Page's second-in-command.

"Sundar has a tremendous ability to see what's ahead and mobilize teams around the super important stuff," Page wrote in a memo announcing Pichai's promotion. "We very much see eye-to-eye when it comes to product, which makes him the perfect fit for this role."

Less than a year later, he was named CEO of Google.

When Alphabet was established as Google's parent company in 2015, Pichai was made CEO at Google, which encompassed search, YouTube, and Android.

As his power grew, Pichai remained well-liked.

"He is literally worshipped inside Google. Engineers love him. Product Managers love him. Business people love him," one Googler wrote on Quora around that time.

In July 2017, Pichai was named to Alphabet's board of directors.

"Sundar has been doing a great job as Google's CEO, driving strong growth, partnerships, and tremendous product innovation. I really enjoy working with him, and I'm excited that he is joining the Alphabet board," Page said at the time.

Two years later came his final promotion at the company. Alphabet's CEO, Page, and president, Sergey Brin, announced that they were stepping down, and Pichai would become Alphabet's CEO.

Page and Brin cofounded Google in 1998. They announced the change in a letter saying that Alphabet and Google "no longer need two CEOs and a President."

Pichai is well-compensated for his work.

Google reported in April 2023 that Pichai earned a total of $226 million in 2022, mostly in stock awards, making him one of America's best-paid CEOs.

 

But the top job at Alphabet also comes with increased public and internal scrutiny.

In 2018, the House Judiciary Committee grilled the CEO about Google's data privacy practices and plans with China.

Two years later, Pichai testified in front of Congress again over antitrust concerns. Two other major Google lawsuits were later filed by the US government over its alleged monopoly tactics.

Google has also dealt with internal turmoil after letting go of one of its top AI ethicists.

In December 2020, Google fired Timnit Gebru. Her exit came weeks after she was asked to retract a paper on the dangers of large language models and spoke out against the company's treatment of minority employees. 

Google employees were "seriously pissed" over how the firing was handled, one told BI at the time, and Gebru said that Pichai and other managers helped create "hostile work environments."

Pichai eventually apologized for how the company dealt with it.

"I want to say how sorry I am for that, and I accept the responsibility of working to restore your trust," he wrote.

Also in 2020, Pichai was at the forefront of Google's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Under his leadership, Google launched initiatives to help search users find accurate, useful information about the coronavirus. 

And like many large tech companies, Alphabet recruited rapidly at the start of the pandemic. Alphabet hired nearly 37,000 new workers in the 12 months leading up to October 2022.

But from late 2022, Pichai had to oversee an era of cost-cutting at the company.

That culminated in job losses in January 2023, when Google layoffs affected 12,000 employees or 6% of its global workforce. Pichai said he took "full responsibility for the decisions that led us here."

Over 1,400 Google employees wrote an open letter to Pichai about how the layoffs were handled. 

"Don't be evil," it read, a reference to the company's original motto.

Googlers also criticized Pichai's big payday in the face of the job cuts, accusing him of "destroying morale and culture" at Google.

Google also laid off hundreds more workers in its central engineering division and hardware team in early 2024.

Pichai has also had to deal with European regulatory issues. French regulators hit Google with a roughly $270 million fine in March 2024, accusing the company of using news outlet articles to train its Gemini AI model.

Pichai has also pushed Google forward in the AI arms race that's preoccupying Silicon Valley.

Google issued a "code red" in December 2022 after the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT sparked concerns about the future of its search engine and whether chatbots might replace it. Pichai redirected resources to focus on building Google's AI products.

It wasn't the first time Pichai expressed interest in the technology, though. In 2016, Pichai announced that Google would be an "AI-first" company. Two years later, he said it's "one of the most important things that humanity is working on" and "more profound" than "electricity or fire."

Google's AI efforts have resulted in its own chatbot.

In February 2023, Google demoed the AI chatbot Bard for the first time. But the demo, which included the bot making a factual error, wasn't massively well-received internally and was called "rushed, botched, myopic" by one employee. Google made Bard available to the public over a month later.

In December 2023, Google's Gemini launched. Gemini is a multimodal AI model that can process images, text, audio, video, and coding languages. And in February 2024, the company merged the two, saying:

"Our mission with Bard has always been to give you direct access to our AI models, and Gemini represents our most capable family of models. To reflect this, Bard will now simply be known as Gemini."

Pichai has also shifted Google's focus to integrating AI into its other products.

At the 2023 Google I/O conference, the CEO announced that Google would add AI features across Google Workspace, including in Search, Gmail, Docs, and other products.

Still, Gemini has had issues. In 2024, Google had to suspend its image generator after people complained that the model produced historically inaccurate photos of US presidents.

Pichai later sent a memo to employees acknowledging the AI controversy. 

"I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias — to be clear, that's completely unacceptable, and we got it wrong."

The problems led to a growing chorus of voices calling for Pichai to step down from his leadership role. 

When Pichai isn't spending his time leading Google, the CEO meets with influential world leaders.

In early June 2022, Pichai attended the CEO Summit of the Americas — hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce and the US Department of State — where business leaders from private sectors across countries in North, South, and Central America, as well as the Caribbean, come together in Los Angeles to discuss how they can work together to stimulate economic growth in their countries.

During the three-day summit, Pichai met with Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, to discuss Google's investments in Canada and how the company can work with the government to spur innovation in the country.

The Alphabet CEO also announced his $1.2 billion commitment to Latin America. 

While Pichai is quite private, he is known to start his day with a cup of tea and an omelet — plus a copy of The Wall Street Journal.

"I read the physical paper every single morning," he told Recode in 2016, adding that he reads The New York Times online.

The Pichai's morning routine also includes scrolling through TechMeme, a niche tech news website that aggregates the latest stories in tech published by media outlets. 

Although he's private, Pichai has spoken out about certain causes since he became a public figure.

In 2015, he responded to then-presidential candidate Donald Trump's suggestion that Muslims be barred from immigrating to the US.

"Let's not let fear defeat our values. We must support Muslim and other minority communities in the US and around the world," he wrote.

In his home country, Pichai is seen as something of a hero.

"You are what they would like to be, an Indian who studied here, went overseas, and did what everyone would dream of doing," interviewer Harsha Bhogle said in a conversation with Pichai for students at Delhi University.

In 2020, Pichai announced that Google would invest $10 billion into India's tech sector over the next five to seven years to make the internet "affordable and useful" to everyone living in the country.

For businesses that need to build a customer pipeline by responding to or creating demand, social environments like Meta's apps can offer what traditional lead generation methods like direct mail or search can't: personalized connection with people open to discovery who are not searching for a specific product or service.¹ In fact, two in three online shoppers agree that social media makes them likely to try new brands and products. Businesses can create and respond to demand with Meta's lead generation products.

Meta's lead generation solutions are focused on helping advertisers find customers that are most likely to engage, convert, and remain loyal to the brand. Most recently, they're evolving to help advertisers drive a high volume of quality leads. In a 2023 study, Meta's instant forms product delivered a 20% lower cost-per-qualified lead (CPQL) when compared to website forms.² This means that with native lead generation products, many advertisers can focus their attention on their highest value potential customers at a lower cost. 

Take Panoramic Doors, a high-end windows and sliding doors retailer based in Dallas, Texas. They use instant forms that allow customers to share simple information like name, email, and budget to generate quality leads that drive sales. The brand recently closed a $24,000 sale in six days with an instant form lead. 

To make the most of Meta's lead generation solutions, consider these four tips.

1. Take advantage of seasonal trends

New Year's resolutions, spring cleaning, and summer vacation are all prime moments when potential customers will be more likely to be interested in your services. Last spring, between the months of April and June, there was 19% year-on-year growth in Meta lead ad submissions.³ Take advantage of these peak seasons to find new customers to grow your business.

2. Make it easy with instant forms

Using tools that eliminate friction for your potential leads and don't require your customer to click off site –  such as auto-filling user info or quick loading on mobile – can prevent leads dropoff. According to Aly Gomez, a Capacity Interactive Consultant, clients are finding instant form leads to be stickier than the leads generated from their website. She recommends focusing on making the form as short as possible by only requesting the user's name and email address.

3. Use Meta's advanced AI to find your target campaign audience 

For small business advertisers, ad sets that use Advantage+ audience with instant forms had 8% lower cost-per-lead, on average, compared to ad sets that used the original audience experience.⁴

4. Improve performance and lead quality with new features

Generating more valuable leads is easier than ever with new features like conditional logic, which can help qualify leads by creating an instant form containing multiple questions within a question flow. John Wai Martial Arts sought to elevate the quality of its leads while minimizing cost-per-quality lead. Leveraging conditional logic, the team streamlined lead submissions by instantly pre-filling prospective customers' details from their Facebook profiles after clicking on an ad. This enabled quick follow-up by the John Wai team and increased the conversion rate from lead to customer by 62% compared to using the instant forms alone.

For lead generation advertisers, integrate your CRM with Conversions API, which can enable a business to leverage their CRM data to drive performance. This works by creating a direct connection between a business' marketing data and Meta's ads delivery systems. A recent analysis of instant forms campaigns found those that had a CRM optimized for conversion leads and connected to the Conversions API cut cost-per-quality lead by 15% and increased those quality lead conversions by 44% on average.⁵ To support businesses of all sizes with CRM integration, Meta has expanded the roster of low friction Meta Business Partners to include Hubspot and Zoho. And for smaller businesses that aren't ready to integrate their CRM, Meta Business Suite (MBS) now includes a free, lightweight CRM system, available to all businesses on Meta, that's designed to simplify lead management from instant forms or click-to-message ads. 

Watch the video to hear more tips from advertisers who are driving quality leads at scale with Meta's instant forms, or learn more here.

This post was created by Meta with Insider Studios

¹ "Discovery-Led Shopping Study" by GFK (Meta-commissioned online survey of 12,000+ respondents ages 18 – 74 in the AU, BR, CA, FR, DE, IN, ID, MX, SK, JP, UK, US, Q2 2022. Qualifying respondents shop online at least twice a month and made an online purchase of beauty, furniture, electronics and/or apparel in the past 3 months at the time of the study.

² Analysis of 15 global 3-cell A/B tests run from Nov 2022-Feb 2023 where advertisers self-reported results and used website forms that were similar to their Meta forms. 86% confidence level. Test compared instant forms campaigns using the conversion leads performance goal against website forms campaigns optimized for website conversions.

³ Year-over-year analysis of over 500M global lead ads submissions across all verticals between April 1, 2022 – June 30, 2022 and April 1, 2023 – June 30, 2023

 ⁴ Analysis based on 9K randomly sampled observations of ad sets from small business group advertisers using Advantage+ audience or the original audience experience that were optimizing for lead generation and quality leads; Oct – Nov 2023.

⁵ Results based on A/B tests on 273 advertisers, with ads delivered globally from Jan 11-28, 2024, and included incentives. Results were statistically significant at a 95% confidence level. Performance may vary. Conversion from lead to quality lead occurs when a user takes a qualifying, lower funnel action identified by the business, which moves them into a "quality lead" status. Qualifying actions or events vary by business, based on their individual sales funnel event stages. 

• At Google IO conference, CEO Sundar Pichai teased where AI is headed next.
• It's going to be all about agents that are better at reasoning and can act on our behalf.
• What if Google did the searching for you?

What if the Google Assistant was actually… an assistant?

It's a question the company finally started answering at the 2024 Google IO conference on Tuesday, where the search giant fired off AI announcements by the dozen.

With Google and other AI companies making advances in how these systems can ingest images, videos, sound, and text, we're beginning to see how these systems are evolving from smart chatbots to more sophisticated tools that can do more of the hard work.

It's something Google CEO Sundar Pichai is thinking a lot about right now.

"I think about AI agents as intelligent systems that show reasoning planning and memory," Pichai said in a roundtable with reporters ahead of the developer show this week.

"They're able to think multiple steps ahead and work across software and systems all to get something done on your behalf and most importantly, with your supervision."

In short: AI agents are what have the best shot at taking this technology from "nice to have" to "need to have."

Project Astra

Pichai said Google is "in the very early days" of developing this, but promised we'd see glimpses of "agentic direction" across Google's products at IO. And there were several, but the big one people will be talking about is Project Astra.

Astra is a vision of what the Google Assistant should have been all along. You can also think of it a smarter version of Google Lens, one that uses real-time computer-vision capabilities to let you ask it questions about what you can see and hear around you.

"We've always wanted to build a universal agent that will be useful in everyday life," Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis said. "Imagine agents that can see and hear what we do better, understand the context we're in and respond quickly in conversation making the pace and quality of interaction feel much more natural."

Google showed a demo of someone holding their phone up with the camera on and asking the AI voice assistant questions about what it was seeing. For example, they pointed it out the window and asked "What neighborhood do you think I'm in?" Correctly, it located Google's King's Cross office in London.

Hassabis stressed that this demo video was recorded in "real time." Google got a lot of blowback in December after a Gemini AI model demo turned out to be edited, so Google needed to emphasize it can really do this — especially after OpenAI showed off a similar demo on Monday.

If there really is no manipulation here, Astra is certainly impressive, and will probably be the big takeaway of the show. But there are other ways these AI agents will emerge in the nearer term.

Google teased a combination of updates that will soon make its Gemini AI chatbot more capable and proactive. Some of this is being unlocked as Google continues to increase the context window, which is the amount of information a large language model can ingest at a time.

Say you want to know something buried deep in a series of very long documents that you don't want to spend hours sifting through. With a large context window, you can share all the documents with Gemini and then ask questions. The model can answer quickly, based on all the information it just ingested.

Tentacles and tailoring

But it's in its legacy products that Google really has an edge when it comes to enabling agent-like qualities.

With its tentacles already in many aspects of our lives, from email to search to maps, Google can synthesize all its knowledge about users and the world around them to not just answer queries, but tailor responses.

"My Gemini should really be different than your Gemini," said Sissie Hsiao, head of Gemini and Google Assistant.

Later this year, Gemini will be able to plan your vacation with a much more granular level of detail, according to Hsiao. The idea is you'll be able to plug in all your specific demands (you like to hike, you hate it when it's too hot, and you're allergic to shellfish) and Gemini will return a detailed itinerary. Chatbots can already do this type of thing, but, if permitted, Gemini will have access to your flight information, travel confirmations in Gmail, and perhaps your hotel, and can use this to inform its answers.

"An AI assistant should be able to solve complex problems, should be able to take actions for you, and also feel very natural and fluid when you engage with it," Hsiao said.

Much of what agents will do is remove steps and shorten tasks. Google is also thinking about this when it comes to Search, as the company evolves its most precious product to spit out answers made using generative AI.

It's rolling out a custom version of Gemini built specifically for Search, combining its knowledge of the web with the AI model's multimodal abilities and giant context window.

Liz Reid, Google's head of Search, showed an example of Google Lens being used to take a video of a record player. The user asks Gemini why the arm isn't staying in place. Google responds with exact instructions for that specific turntable.

As ever, Google has some confusing branding to solve: Lens, Assistant, Gemini, Astra. Ultimately, though, a lot of this eventually merges together. On Tuesday, Google gave us clues on what this logical conclusion will look like.

Or, as Reid put it: "This is a way for Google to do the searching for you."

• Google showcases potential killer apps for generative AI.
• The company demoed an AI agent that can help you remember where you left your glasses. 
• Google's infrastructure, talent, data, and experience makes it a strong player in developing useful AI tech.

Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in 2022, there's been no real "killer app" to get consumers embracing AI in massive numbers.

Even ChatGPT may not count: The chatbot's online traffic is still only about 2% of Google's, according to Similarweb. Other chatbots are doing much worse, leaving investors mostly focused on corporate use cases.

A killer app is an application that is so useful and so easy to use that it convinces everyday people to adopt a whole new technology en masse.

Spreadsheets and word-processing software made many individuals buy personal computers for the first time. The internet, possibly the biggest killer app of all, made us all buy smartphones, tablets, and a host of other connected devices.

So, what will be the killer app for generative AI? Put another way: My mom has never used ChatGPT, but she Googles stuff all the time. What will get this octogenarian, and everyone else, using genAI as often as they use toothbrushes?

AI killer app contenders

At its IO developer conference on Tuesday, Google showed off some pretty amazing AI killer app contenders.

These were shared mostly under the umbrella of Project Astra, an experimental Google endeavor at the leading edge of AI models and agents.

"To be truly useful, an agent needs to understand and respond to the complex and dynamic world just like people do — and take in and remember what it sees and hears to understand context and take action," Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, said. "It also needs to be proactive, teachable and personal, so users can talk to it naturally and without lag or delay."

Never forget where you left your glasses again

In a video, Google showed an employee holding up a smartphone with the camera on. She walked through DeepMind's office in London pointing the device at various things and asking questions.

The camera at one point showed a speaker and she asked what it was. A Google AI model lurking on the phone (and in the cloud) answered correctly.

Then she pointed the smartphone at a colleague's computer screen, which had a bunch of software code on it. The AI model correctly told her what that code was for, just by "looking" at the live video feed from the camera.

After a couple more examples, the DeepMind employee asked if the AI agent remembered where she left her glasses. The Google system replied that she'd left them next to an apple on her desk in the office. She walked over there and, lo and behold, there were her glasses by the apple on her desk. The AI agent "remembered" the glasses in the background of previous frames from the phone's live video feed.

If Google's AI agent can help regular people never lose their glasses ever again (or their keys or other stuff at home or at work), then I think we have a killer app.

Simple, useful, and quirky things like this can turn wonky technology into products everyone uses. For instance, famed investor Warren Buffett never bought a personal computer, until he wanted to play chess online with Bill Gates.

Returning shoes

Other Google executives discussed similarly compelling, everyday applications for genAI.

CEO Sundar Pichai said the company's AI agents can plan and execute multiple tasks — to the point where the bots will be able to return a pair of shoes you ordered online and don't want.

Calendar entries

Google VP Sissie Hsiao showed off another killer application for this new technology.

In this demo, a smartphone camera was pointed at a school flier with details of several upcoming events. The Google AI agent captured all the dates, times, and other details and automatically loaded them into the user's Google Calendar.

Rental agreements

What if you want to know how a pet might change your apartment rental situation? Do you want to actually read the 12 legal documents you skimmed and signed last year? Of course you don't.

You can now drop all these documents into Google's Gemini Advanced AI model and start asking it questions like "If I get a pet, how does this change my rental situation?"

Google's AI agent will ingest all the documents quickly and answer your questions by referencing specific parts of the agreements.

If generative AI can do annoying, boring tasks like this, a lot of regular people will start using the technology pretty quickly.

"Google was built for this moment"

When done well, these AI agent tasks will seem easy. But Google has been working behind the scenes for at least a decade to get to this point.

This type of technology requires massive computing power, lots of energy, huge data centers, muscular AI chips, lightning fast networking gear, and oodles of information to train the models. Google has all this in spades.

DeepMind's Hassabis gave a little taste of this when discussing Project Astra's ability to respond to questions during live video feeds.

"These agents were built on our Gemini model and other task specific models, and were designed to process information faster by continuously encoding video frames, combining the video and speech input into a timeline of events, and caching this information for efficient recall," he explained.

There are very few other companies with the infrastructure, talent, data, and experience to pull this off. (Maybe OpenAI and Microsoft together?)

"Google was built for this moment," Pichai said.

• An AI-controlled F-16 faced off against a manned Fighting Falcon in a historic real-world dogfight.
• Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, aboard the AI-piloted jet, said it was a "roughly an even fight."
• The technology is not quite ready for the real battlefield, Kendall said, but progress is promising.

Earlier this month, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall made history, riding in the cockpit of an AI-piloted F-16 Fighting Falcon through a series of simulated close-quarters air-to-air engagements, more commonly known as "good old-fashioned dogfights." These notional scraps pitted the Air Force's most advanced "AI agents," a term used to describe the artificial intelligence models devised to pilot tactical aircraft, against highly-trained human fighter pilots with both notional 20mm cannons and close-range air-to-air missiles.

"Basically, when you're in an engagement like that, what the two pilots are trying to do to gain an advantage is fly the most optimal possible trajectory for their aircraft… so you can get a missile off, and he's trying to do the same to you," Kendall said at an AI expo event hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project in Washington, DC.

"So the skill of the pilots is really important. We were up against a pilot who had two or three thousand hours of experience. He was very good. It was roughly an even fight. But against a less experienced pilot, the AI… [and] the automation would have performed better," he added.

Saying that it was a "roughly even fight" against a pilot with some 2,000 to 3,000 hours in the cockpit of the F-16 may seem like a relatively simple comparison, but this single comment suggests an extremely high degree of capability in the AI agent.

Air Force fighter pilots optimally see between 200 and 250 hours of flight time in their aircraft per year, though those figures can be curtailed for any number of reasons. That means that a pilot with 2,000 and 3,000 hours has between 10 and 15 years of experience, if not more, since unit functions, follow-on education and training, command billets, and more often hinder flight hour accrual for even the most capable of pilots as their careers press on.

In 2014, the Air Force reported that only around 300 pilots in the world had accrued more than 3,000 hours in the F-16 Fighting Falcon since it entered service in 1978; supporting that claim, F-16.net currently lists only 311 pilots ever to achieve this distinction.

In other words, the Air Force Secretary currently places the branch's F-16-piloting AI as roughly comparable in dogfighting skill to some of the nation's most experienced and capable aviators.

Kendall rode in the front seat of the Air Force's heavily modified X-62 VISTA — a Block 30 F-16D that has previously incorporated technology, including multi-axis thrust-vector control, not found on any of the Air Force's operational Vipers. Despite its three-decade-spanning tenure as a part of the Air Force's Test Pilot School, the aircraft now sits at the forefront of America's efforts to propel air combat into an entirely new era — one where conventionally crewed aircraft are accompanied by their own formations of AI-enabled drone fighters.

Riding behind Kendall in the cockpit was one of the Air Force's few VISTA-qualified test pilots, trained to handle not just the unique capabilities of the test bed aircraft but its new AI software as well. At any point in the exercises, that test pilot could have shut down the AI agent and taken control of the aircraft if necessary for the safety of the jet or its occupants, though that has yet to occur in any of the test flights taking place since this effort made the leap to real aircraft in December 2022.

"So we did about 10 or a dozen different situations where I was in the front seat and I had a button on my stick where basically I initiated the automation," Kendall explained.

Despite the seemingly common perception of AI as inherently superior to human pilots for these sorts of combat applications, the Air Force still has a lot of work to do before this technology finds its way onto the real battlefield.

"That technology is not quite ready yet, but it's making very good progress. We got to see three different versions of it. They all performed, I think, in a way which suggests to me personally very strongly that we're on the right path and we're gonna get to where we're headed," Kendall said.

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