The Promise and Pitfalls of Google’s New AI Agent (Project Mariner)
I have subscribed to the highest tier subscription of Google AI. This grants me access to Project Mariner, which is an AI agent that can complete tasks for you on a remote Linux machine with access to the internet. I have been eagerly awaiting access to a powerful and useful AI agent, but Project Mariner slightly misses the mark.
The remote computer that Project Mariner controls doesn’t have its own account and doesn’t remember your login information between sessions. This means that if you need to log your agent into your account to complete actions, that you will need to do that every time you use the agent (which is a manual and tedious process). If you do log into your account on the remote machine, you will need to remember to log out on that machine (it doesn’t automatically log out at the end of a session).
The remote Linux machine the agent controls is not in America, so you can’t use it to access any web resource that is region locked outside of the United States. This explicitly means that you can’t use the agent to automate using certain prompts on Google Gemini, which was the use case I was the most excited for. One odd quirk of the agent is that it needed to be told to use the scroll bar to scroll down on a page.
It kept thinking it was scrolling when it wasn’t, so I had to tell it to use the scroll bar (which I thought was a little awkward). You would prefer for your agent to operate unsupervised, but it can fall into little inescapable loops like that if you’re not there to watch over it. I have the ability to spawn ten of these agents at once on different machines, which sounds really powerful at first.
But with agents not having easy access to my account without my supervision, not being fully trustworthy to act unsupervised, and not having access to applications region locked to America: I now find myself struggling to figure out what to use my new superpower to actually do. Do you have any ideas for how I can apply this brand new technology? Let me know in the comments below, and stay tuned for the next post.
NOTE:
Upon further testing, after I wrote and scheduled this blog post for publishing, I have discovered that the remote computer used by the agent is not consistently outside of the United States. This means that you are essentially spinning a roulette wheel each time you spawn an agent in terms of where it is located and what it can access due to region locks.
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Nicholas Alexander Benson