Sergey Brin is back. And we saw this unexpectedly firsthand. It’s not every day we meet Google’s co-founder, but we had the opportunity to talk with him for a few minutes during Google I/O in Mountain View. It was not a planned meeting, but a chance meeting. A casual conversation in which he confirms that one of the projects he’s back to Google is called: Project Astra.

We were having a special presentation of the Astra when Brin opened the door. I was about to say something to the two Google engineers who were explaining to us how the new multi-modal AI works, but when we realized the situation, we introduced ourselves to him and stopped him to tell us more about his new role at Google.

Brin appears at Google I/O

She is seen very often with Google’s billionaire founder Larry Page. And Google I/O is the perfect opportunity for everyone to see their dedication once again focused on Google. Especially in Gemini.

Brin has been working hand in hand with Google CEO Sundar Pichai for months. But he’s also doing this with DeepMind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis. Brin is in the middle of everything, Very active role in supporting artificial intelligence As a central part of Google’s new strategy.

Astra is not a project to be proud of when talked about. Of the long list of new features at this Google I/O, the one getting the most attention is Astra. The most surprising thing for Brin is how they arrived at Gemini, using original work to create it.

“It’s amazing how we can use the same model in multiple applications without needing to specialize or modify it.“Brin explains about the use of Gemini, which was originally for text, for different applications, such as Astra, which can recognize audio or video.

Brin says he participated in the creation of the original model without overshadowing the rest of the team. Brin describes it to us like this: “Honestly, this is the model that we originally developed as a series of tests for scaling different models. This is not what we expected our experiments to be used for“But it looks like they went above and beyond our expectations.”

The DeepMind experiment eventually became one of the pillars of the new Google. “For this reason Here we add it to all kinds of products and we continue to discover new use cases every day,” says Brin. They started by adding Gemini to a chatbot, and eventually deployed Gemini everywhere from the search engine to Gmail, through Maps, and quickly integrated into millions of Android phones.

But if there’s one device that fits Project Astra perfectly, it’s glasses. Dave Burke, VP of Android engineering, hinted that we won’t have any new hardware devices during this Google I/O because A Google event dedicated to augmented reality and mixed reality will be held soon. At a Google event focused on hardware, we were finally able to see the introduction of smart glasses that will directly use Project Astra, much like what Meta has done with its Ray-Ban Glasses.

So what do these glasses have to do with Sergey Brin? You have to go back more than 10 years. Brin was one of the biggest supporters of Google Glass. Glasses that were canceled despite Google’s many attempts to protect them.

Maybe they came too early. Google has the opportunity to save the smart glasses project with Project Astra. And Sergey Brin has a chance to redeem himself for this. Google’s founder is once again taking part in the company’s new projects. Although it’s a coincidence that he overlaps with us, it’s not like he’s learning the multimodal artificial intelligence that will power his new glasses. A new era, old dreams.

in Xataka | Project Astra is Google’s ‘It’. And they want it to work with augmented reality glasses