Enlarge / A video still of Project Astra demo at the Google I/O conference keynote in Mountain View on May 14, 2024. (credit: Google)

Just one day after OpenAI revealed GPT-4o, which it bills as being able to understand what's taking place in a video feed and converse about it, Google announced Project Astra, a research prototype that features similar video comprehension capabilities. It was announced by Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on Tuesday at the Google I/O conference keynote in Mountain View, California.

Hassabis called Astra "a universal agent helpful in everyday life." During a demonstration, the research model showcased its capabilities by identifying sound-producing objects, providing creative alliterations, explaining code on a monitor, and locating misplaced items. The AI assistant also exhibited its potential in wearable devices, such as smart glasses, where it could analyze diagrams, suggest improvements, and generate witty responses to visual prompts.

Google says that Astra uses the camera and microphone on a user's device to provide assistance in everyday life. By continuously processing and encoding video frames and speech input, Astra creates a timeline of events and caches the information for quick recall. The company says that this enables the AI to identify objects, answer questions, and remember things it has seen that are no longer in the camera's frame.

Enlarge / Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder and chief executive officer of Inflection AI UK Ltd., during a town hall on day two of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024. Suleyman joined Microsoft in March. (credit: Getty Images)

Microsoft is working on a new large-scale AI language model called MAI-1, which could potentially rival state-of-the-art models from Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI, according to a report by The Information. This marks the first time Microsoft has developed an in-house AI model of this magnitude since investing over $10 billion in OpenAI for the rights to reuse the startup's AI models. OpenAI's GPT-4 powers not only ChatGPT but also Microsoft Copilot.

The development of MAI-1 is being led by Mustafa Suleyman, the former Google AI leader who recently served as CEO of the AI startup Inflection before Microsoft acquired the majority of the startup's staff and intellectual property for $650 million in March. Although MAI-1 may build on techniques brought over by former Inflection staff, it is reportedly an entirely new large language model (LLM), as confirmed by two Microsoft employees familiar with the project.

With approximately 500 billion parameters, MAI-1 will be significantly larger than Microsoft's previous open source models (such as Phi-3, which we covered last month), requiring more computing power and training data. This reportedly places MAI-1 in a similar league as OpenAI's GPT-4, which is rumored to have over 1 trillion parameters (in a mixture-of-experts configuration) and well above smaller models like Meta and Mistral's 70 billion parameter models.