AI Takeover: Google Assistant Replaced, Layoffs Ensue

0:00If you've listened to this podcast for a while you know that I'm pretty active in criticizing Siri or Google's assistant or even Amazon's Alexa. us. So today on the podcast, we're going to be talking about Google, whose AI assistant is getting a major update. We'll be diving into what that's looking like and where we got this information from. So Google's assistant, like I said, is going to get a major update. And this is according to an internal email, which was reported by Axios. So they're going to be embedding LLM technology into this. And of course, this is no surprise, right? They've done all of this work and have come out with Google Bard, which is a really powerful technology.

0:37And so it just makes perfect sense that something like their assistant which was not using ai technology in the past now will be able to have this and come up with really custom responses and you know what's really what's interesting about this is that really these kind of personal assistants alexa siri google's assistant they all have been like for lack of a better word they've kind of been masquerading as ai anyways right is this artificial assistant that can like help you but in reality they were all just hard-coded right they could google's assistant could just do a google search it would give you the response if you asked it to tell you a joke it had a list of canned responses it could give you and at the end of the day this thing wasn't making anything up it was just pre-programmed to do everything so i think it makes perfect sense that now this is actually able to be a conversational piece it's able to customize and change its responses and you know essentially google i think this is a no-brainer because they're just going to be integrating in my assumption what is essentially Google borrowed into what they're doing.

1:33So there was an email that was recently leaked to Axios and the email essentially indicated that the team leads are preparing for major organizational changes and restructuring, which is going to help pave the way for the integration of LLM technology. So as the integration unfolds, Google is going to reshape its current vision and workflows over the coming months, essentially doing what I believe is going to be a complete tech overhaul. So while the company didn't specify why they've chosen to make this shift right i think the current landscape um ai being so popular them putting so much time and resources into integrating ai into virtually everything else in their company um i think this is you know obviously going to be the right time for them to do this if they want to keep pace and i think they have a little bit of a um you know a little bit of an edge because if amazon's alexa and apple's siri would like to do similar things they're going to have to focus on either integrating someone else's technology, LLM, or developing their own, which inevitably those companies are big enough, they will just develop their own.

2:31But Google may be the first one to be able to pull this off because they've already come out with BARD. What's interesting, in my opinion, is the fact that, of course, Siri, Alexa, and Google's assistant have all kind of pegged themselves as being this super useful assistant. Like, in reality, they're not very sophisticated, and they haven't really validated their usefulness in a lot of practical applications that they were initially intended for. Of course, you can say, you know, something like, okay, Siri, call X, Y, and Z person. I think that's what a majority of people actually use Siri for is just getting to call someone for them.

3:05When really this thing, if it was actually a personal assistant, would be able to do so much more. It would be able to schedule stuff and do stuff and really create advanced content for you or whatever, right? Really powerful advice, be your own life coach, whatever, right? That's kind of what you think of when you think of an assistant or what it could be has a potential for and up until this point of course these assistants prior to this ai technology has not done this so i think as llm technology advances i think it's certain that users are going to be able to get a lot more out of these personal assistants they're definitely going to appreciate this um and i think that google is kind of preparing for this eventuality right the company i think is really betting on a more versatile digital assistant that is capable of kind of adjusting its capabilities as needed.

3:51So I think the shift to integrate LLM technology into Google's assistant was a really important one. I think it's interesting. I think we're going to see a lot of other companies follow suit, namely Amazon and Alexa. I think the move is really going to transform how these assistants work for consumers, developers, and even some of Google's own employees who are using it. So I think Google has committed to supporting both the new and old approaches during this transition, right? So your old Google devices, your old, you know, Google assistants will still work. But I think it's going to be interesting to see what level.

4:25And I think in saying that they perhaps are saying that you'll need to buy a new one if you're going to want to get the AI. So I'm not sure if that's the implication here, but I think that would be a very interesting implication if that's essentially what, you know, what they're saying here. So I think the whole overhaul has begun with the mobile version of the product. And I think that this kind of restructuring has led to layoffs. And Google is kind of working to reposition its team for the new project, right? I think, you know, the layoffs are probably unfortunate. People that have been working on this for a long time, but inevitably this entire product is gonna get overhauled and it completely changed.

5:02And so I think inevitably they're going to need to move a lot more AI engineers, AI scientists into this department to really make this thing successful. so that will require a lot of kind of restructuring and changing up of the team i think google isn't the only one making these moves other tech technology companies i think including amazon are actually looking into using ai systems for the digital assistants google's assistant has what's interesting is this thing's actually served hundreds of millions of users since its launch which was over seven years ago which is hard to believe but i think despite the the organizational changes that they're going to be seeing.

5:38Google maintains, I think, a pretty strong commitment to the assistant and what it plans on doing with this in the future. And then I think, of course, with the advent of generative AI and LLM technology, I think they see some really enormous potential for just improving the service overall. And I think that's why they're going into this. So I think as AI tech continues to evolve, we're going to see a lot of, you know, in my opinion, it's not just going to be the legacy Apple, Amazon, Google that are improving their old technology but I think we're actually going to start seeing a lot of a lot of new companies come out in this space you know we're already seeing humane and some other ones that are looking at this so I think it's going to be a really interesting and exciting area to follow in the future