By Danny Goodwin
Publication Date: 2026-01-26 16:32:00
Google is working toward a future where it understands what you want before you ever type a search.
Now Google is pushing that thinking onto the device itself, using small AI models that perform nearly as well as much larger ones.
What’s happening. In a research paper presented at EMNLP 2025, Google researchers show that a simple shift makes this possible: break “intent understanding” into smaller steps. When they do, small multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) become powerful enough to match systems like Gemini 1.5 Pro — while running faster, costing less, and keeping data on the device.
The future is intent extraction. Large AI models can already infer intent from user behavior, but they usually run in the cloud. That creates three problems. They’re slower. They’re more expensive. And they raise privacy concerns, because user actions can be sensitive.
Google’s solution is to split the task into two simple steps that small, on-device models can…