Just before the holiday break, CEO Sundar Pichai and other Google executives had a 2025 strategy meeting, with Gemini being the “biggest focus” looking ahead.
At the employee meeting this month (via CNBC), Sundar Pichai said: “Scaling Gemini on the consumer side will be our biggest focus next year.”
CEO Sundar Pichai said Google will introduce a number of AI features in the first half of the year.
In particular, Google expects the Gemini app (gemini.google.com) to be the next first-party application — there are currently 15 — to hit half a billion (presumably) monthly users. In October, Pichai marked Google Maps entering the 2 billion monthly users mark alongside Search, Gmail, Android, Chrome, Play, and YouTube, with each of those services featuring Gemini capabilities.
“In history, you don’t always need to be first but you have to execute well and really be the best in class as a product,” he said. “I think that’s what 2025 is all about.”
Overall, Pichai said Google has “some work to do in 2025 to close the gap and establish a leadership position there as well.”
Meanwhile, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said that Google is going to “turbo charge” the Gemini app and that the “products themselves are going to evolve massively over the next year or two.” The goal is to create a universal assistant — which is how Project Astra is described — that “can seamlessly operate over any domain, any modality or any device.”
Speaking of Astra, CNBC says it will be “updated in the first half of the year.” That could possibly be in reference to camera/vision capabilities coming to Gemini Live. It’s currently being tested as a standalone application (seen below), but will come to consumers via the Gemini app.
We last got an update on Astra during the Gemini 2.0 launch earlier this month. Hassabis also said there are no “plans for this kind of subscription level” in response to a question about whether Google, like OpenAI, is going to offer a $200 per month tier.
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