Google Weighs Gemini AI Project To Tell People Their Life Story Using Their Photos and Searches

The Gemini LLMs developed by Google Deepmind can process more than text, including images, video and audio. So a team at Google has proposed using AI to create a 'bird's-eye' view of users' lives, reports CNBC, 'using mobile phone data such as photographs and searches.'

Dubbed 'Project Ellmann,' after biographer and literary critic Richard David Ellmann, the idea would be to use LLMs like Gemini to ingest search results, spot patterns in a user's photos, create a chatbot and 'answer previously impossible questions,' according to a copy of a presentation viewed by CNBC. Ellmann's aim, it states, is to be 'Your Life Story Teller.'

It's unclear if the company has plans to produce these capabilities within Google Photos, or any other product. Google Photos has more than 1 billion users and 4 trillion photos and videos, according to a company blog post... A product manager for Google Photos presented Project Ellman alongside Gemini teams at a recent internal summit, according to documents viewed by CNBC. They wrote that the teams spent the past few months determining that large language models are the ideal tech to make this bird's-eye approach to one's life story a reality. Ellmann could pull in context using biographies, previous moments and subsequent photos to describe a user's photos more deeply than 'just pixels with labels and metadata,' the presentation states...

'We trawl through your photos, looking at their tags and locations to identify a meaningful moment,' a presentation slide reads. 'When we step back and understand your life in its entirety, your overarching story becomes clear....' The team also demonstrated 'Ellmann Chat,' with the description: 'Imagine opening ChatGPT but it already knows everything about your life. What would you ask it?'

Reached for a comment, a Google spokesperson told CNBC that Google Photos 'has always used AI to help people search their photos and videos, and we're excited about the potential of LLMs to unlock even more helpful experiences.

'This was an early internal exploration and, as always, should we decide to roll out new features, we would take the time needed to ensure they were helpful to people, and designed to protect users' privacy and safety as our top priority.'

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