Google's MO since always has been to release great products or services for free, position themselves high and then abandon them or just find uses for Enterprise sales.
I'm pretty sure they are doing it because they get some research experience by shrinking and improving these models, and because they know that by doing this they get some good PR among the dev community.
It just repopulates the context. It's absolutely infuriating the way it behaves now, since there are not many workarounds to minimize token usage unless you use caveman [1].
It's not actually doing browser actions like Playwright or other browser automation tools, rather than direct API and MCP calls/actions. This is a whole new subset of API and connections that are all contained within the Agent context, no browser mocking. That's why they are creating these new protocols, so the full governance can work within the context of the Agent and its available tools.
As I said, it doesn't have to make sense, but this is being pushed on us anyway...
There's a slightly new topic called Agentic Commerce, where you say for example: "purchase for me the most energy efficient dishwasher with a budget of $600", and the agent will connect via specialized via special MCP Servers and APIs to available stores, and will do the full purchase process for you.
This MPP helps bridge the gap between the agent putting the product "in the basket", to actually completing the full purchase process.
Disclaimer: I'm not in any way advocating for this use case, but it's part of my job to understand how it works. Part of what I do is try to help Agents understand, for example, what is "an efficient dishwasher" using actual data, and not hallucinated info.
I know most of this affects only the US, but I'm wondering where this will go in the EU if the Age Verification Tech goes ahead in America. There's been lots of efforts to increase surveillance disguised as protection for kids in the EU and UK.
The Swiss implementation of eID may be hint that governments may/will take the responsibility to implement and maintain the tech, but the multiple intrusions and lobbying by Palantir and friends in the EU gives me the ick.
>2. How do you handle the semantic gap? LLMs operate in natural language/fuzzy logic space, while formal methods require precise specifications. What's the translation layer like?
From what I understood, this validates the output correctness, not that the output aligns with the user goals, so there's still room for the LLM to get the user goals wrong, and this is only to validate the mathematical consistency between the output code and the formal specification (in this paper, within the ESBMC framework for C++ code).
So it's kind of tight scoped, in this case, but I think it points in the right direction for coding assistants, which usually get some language primitives wrong.
This is the job a junior developer may deliver in their first weeks at a new job, so this is the way it should be treated as: good intentions, not really good quality.
AI coding needs someone behind to steer it to do better, and in some cases, it does. But still hasn't left the junior phase, and while that doesn't happen, there's still the need for a good developer to deliver good results.
It really depends on the driver lottery. Do you have good driver support? Good, you'll have a mostly flawless experience.
Generic drivers? You either get weird cpu usage patterns, or perfectly normal behavior. Maybe an update will break everything. Welcome to the Linux Driver Lottery.
It's really good nowadays, but the issues remain the same sadly, and it's not Linux devs fault either, it's just the manufacturer lack of support.
TBH it's difficult to take serious any campaign running through these crowdfunding platforms. My "scam alert" sirens start to go off any time I see these kind of links.
I'm pretty sure they are doing it because they get some research experience by shrinking and improving these models, and because they know that by doing this they get some good PR among the dev community.