A Different Gemini
Almost ten years ago, as the Ubi team began shipping out the first devices, we were faced with the pressure of needing to bring down the cost of the device, deliver promised features, ship out remaining items, deal with hardware defects, and raise the money needed to do all of this. It seemed insurmountable. We had locked ourselves in a conference room and brought in a consultant to try to figure out our next step.
One of the concepts was the gemini.
The Ubi was going to channel a virtual version of oneself that would always be on the lookout and try to solve problems for the owner in the background. It was going to be like a guardian angel, a fairy godmother, or whatever other conjuring one could imagine that had our best interest in mind.
This was before LLMs and before many of the tools that are in place to make building the hardware and software to make this easy. Ultimately, we didn’t build it. We tried to shave off the minimum viable version of the gemini, software you could use to communicate with your friends called Ubi Speak. It was a new business that we couldn’t move forward.
What reminded me of our struggles was Google’s announcement of Gemini. It’s a more capable version of Bard. I think? It’s not really clear from marketing. Bard’s an interface, Gemini’s the model… Pro? Ultra? Diet?
In some sense, the idea of these LLMs is to eventually provide some sort of agent that can take care of things for us so we can spend our time writing prompts for art and poetry. The gemini concept lives on.
