This means:
- Downloading or updating the Assistant app now gives you Gemini instead.
- You can switch back to Assistant in the Gemini app settings.
- This might be Google’s first step towards replacing Assistant completely with Gemini.
- Some users are unaware of the switch and see two Gemini apps on their phones.
Overall, this may suggest Google is phasing out Assistant and transitioning users to the newer Gemini AI technology.
The AI part runs in the cloud or on the phone?
Cloud. LLMs aren’t there where they can be run on phones at conversational speed yet.
They absolutely are if you run something like open chat 1.5B, they just want to lock people into their ecosystem.
I guess you can scale it down enough. But if it’s worse than chatgpt 3.5 people will call it terrible and that’s not really what they want right now
It’s about the training and tuning. If a model is very good at the few dozen things that I’m likely to want my phone to do, and able to recognize when it should ask a remote, larger model for help, that’s pretty excellent and could conceivably fit on a phone. Even better if the system uses my usage data to train the model to be better for me. For example: I ask it to build me a playlist a few times, but never ask it for recipes. Eventually this usage data retrains to better handle playlist building (probably using a RAG because of how specific the data is) and drops all the training needed for making recipes, which it can always call up the chain for.
It would still be better than the default Google assistant
Weird I have an option to run on the phone. It says it’s more limited but it’s still an option. Samsung S24 Ultra