Google this week introduced powerful new features to its AI mode in search. It’s called Personal Intelligence, and it weaves together many of the company’s existing services in fundamentally new ways.
This was also recently introduced in Gemini, Google’s AI chatbot. Business Insider’s Pranav Dixit tried it and was blown away. Here is his review:
Personal Intelligence feels like Google has been quietly taking notes my entire life and has finally decided to hand me a notebook.
With my permission, Gemini can tap into my Google Account (Gmail, Photos, search history, YouTube, etc.) to reason around my entire account and answer questions, just like a human assistant would. However, this account holds years of receipts about my life.
This is what I have been hoping for since the explosion of AI-powered chatbots in late 2022. At the time, I was pouring my soul into ChatGPT and hoping to get some smart answers. Then the bot will forget about me like a genius goldfish. Over the past few years, OpenAI and Anthropic have enabled chatbots to connect to services like Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Calendar. But Google has a home field advantage. Google already has the broadest view of what users actually do, search, watch, and save.
Gemini’s ability to connect the dots is frightening and goes far beyond what ChatGPT or Claude can do. When I asked my parents, who have already visited the Bay Area several times, for sightseeing ideas, they correctly guessed that we had already done some hiking and a trip to the redwoods, and suggested museums and gardens.
I asked Gemini how she knew, and she said she guessed this based on “breadcrumbs” left in my Google account. Family emails, photos of Muir Woods, Gmail parking reservations, and a Google search for “easy hikes for seniors.”
This is so powerful that Google is already trying to pre-empt this anomaly. Vice President Josh Woodward said Google is “taking steps to filter or obfuscate personal data” from conversations with Gemini.
“We’re not training the system to learn your license plate number. We’re training the system to understand that if you ask for your license plate number, it can find it for you,” he wrote recently.
So I asked for the license plate number and was able to figure it out based on a photo of my car in Google Photos.
I also asked Gemini when my car insurance was due for renewal and they told me exactly based on the email from AAA in my Gmail inbox.
When we asked for help planning our upcoming trip, they explained the fact that we were traveling with a toddler. Because we already know that we have a baby. Of course it is.
This is the future that every AI company continues to promise. Last year, Meta said its new north star was not the Metaverse, the alternate VR world that literally gives the company its name, but a “personal superintelligence,” an AI that “gets to know us deeply, understands our goals, and helps us achieve them.”
One path to that vision is AI-powered glasses that can see and hear what you see and hear, turning your everyday life into material for an always-on assistant. To get there, Meta has poured billions of dollars into recruiting and the data centers needed to run it.
But Meta doesn’t have a digital record of my life like Google does. I rarely post on Facebook. I mostly swipe through Instagram Reels. WhatsApp is encrypted. And since Meta discontinued my favorite VR workout app, Supernatural, there’s been little reason to use that Quest headset.
Mr. Mehta talks about “individual superintelligence” as a future goal. As far as I know, Google just shipped it.
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