Google I/O
io.google
io.google
I think they've lost track of the meaning of IO and its keynotes for users. They should rather have a separate Gemini event like they had a separate Android one last week.
They're collectively losing track of their product verticals because they're too focused on shoving AI down everything. Google Home is a cluster-f, basic things keep failing, and every other announcement from the Google Home VP is about Gemini. It took them years to reduce the frequency at which devices go offline.
Even their sessions seem underwhelming. It's a mixture of "what's new in X" and "AI" this and that.
This alone is such a crazy time to experience the amount of compute our society is adding globally.
Geminis quality increased again + long running agents. This will hurt so many people who do 'stuff on a computer'.
If this hits production, i probably would prefer to fire 1-2 collegues and get their salary in tokens. And its only a question of time until someone has the same thoughts about me.
Nothing of all of that is underwhelming.
How can we have such extrem opposit viewpoints to this?
Nonethless, in comparision to a lot of other companies, Google has Deepmind and the money to just do all of it without spending money which doesn't exist.
- Launching is rewarded, keeping the lights on is not
- The hot new teams get far more resources than tried and true ones
You could sum this up in three words as "new is better".
This is why Google Home is getting worse. It worked well enough, but nobody gets promoted for keeping it like that. People get promoted for launching something new on that platform and cherry-picking statistics to show that they had "impact".
This is why everything at the keynote was AI. AI is the new hot dumpster fire that every resource is being poured into. And including AI in every product gives so many people the opportunity to launch new stuff, and demonstrate "impact".
And while I/O is for developers, you'd be foolish if you thought that Wall St. wasn't paying attention. Stock was down $10 for the day before I/O started, but during that keynote it gained $5. It didn't hold it, but clearly the keynote affected the stock price. Sundar knows this.
Steve really had product presentations down. I wish people at least tried to copy him.
Fart noise
Look at the MacBook Air launch. Jobs didn't have to say anything about how thin it was, or list product dimensions on a spec sheet. He just pulled it out of an envelope.
Likewise with the iPod. "1,000 songs in your pocket" not "It has a real hard drive with 5GB of storage."
"What is the MacBook Air? In a sentence, it's the world's thinnest notebook". [1] Then goes about listing product weight and dimensions of competitors. Granted he then visually compared the thinness, but still listed numbers.
THEN he mentioned the envelope and pulled it out... Then more specs (in the Apple style like it looks good, has a multi-touch trackpad, etc, followed by actual HDD/SDD size, and CPU spec available).
Masterfully done and well-presented regardless!
AND the product was right then and there and he could demo it and use it live
Steve practice his speech and keynote way more than any others. Once you have talent + hardwork it is hard to replicate. But even taking out the talent itself, none of the keynote are prepped to the details of what Steve would do.
In Steve's view. They probably don't give a damn about product marketing.
Are they just training it a bit longer until it tops benchmarks?
Remember that leaderboard position is very important, and many leaderboards are perf/$. So, to push the share price up and be top of leaderboards, the company might falsely quote a loss-leading price, and maybe set quotas so people can't cause too big losses.
Hence the cost.
Is it? I thought Flash 3.5 was beating 3.1 Pro.
It went from "Google's take on Apple's WWDC and launches" to "AI everywhere all at once". Like, look at how much awesome shit Google dropped between 2008 and 2020! Really sad.
To be clear, it's not just Google. This is happening to all of the big conferences. Nothing but AI. Okay, maybe not CES. But still.
My conclusion: maybe they did use Gemini to brainstorm.
Convo link: https://g.co/gemini/share/26a0549dc579
For instance, you can't translate a Japanese sentence into English until you reach the verb at the end; no amount of latency improvement can overcome the fact that languages have different word orders.
The YouTube real-time translation are utter garbage. And that may the less bad of the real-time translations out there. Still pure garbage.
If you watch anything specific to one sport/hobby, the number of words that are incorrectly translated is just wild.
Doom ran on MS-DOS, which - by modern standards - provided a shockingly minimal set of abstractions for programs. I think about the only thing you need to run Doom is the int 21h "API" to access the FAT filesystem and perform keyboard I/O. Note that MS-DOS did not provide facilities such as memory virtualization / management, process management, video drivers, sound drivers, etc - that was all provided by the hardware itself, which had its own hardware interrupts handled by the code in the device's ROM. It's why Doom required you to choose the type of a sound card you have, the interrupt / DMA channel to use, etc.
So I think this is a lot less of a flex than it seems; in fact, Anthropic using agents to build a semi-unusable compiler is far more of an achievement. Providing enough of int 21h to run Doom is probably something that a human could do in a weekend, doubly so if they can peek at the source code of FreeDOS.
> On June 18, 2026, Gemini CLI and Gemini Code Assist IDE extensions will stop serving requests for Google AI Pro and Ultra, as well as those using it free of charge using Gemini Code Assist for individuals.
https://developers.googleblog.com/an-important-update-transi...
I much prefer it to having to click through links to find things. My last handful of searches were:
- Looking up open hours for a local store
- Defining words
- "postgres select where string has prefix"
- "cloudformation read parameter from ssm"
Things where I want to look up a fact, but want an answer right away without having to read through multiple pages.
I would definitely give it a shot if you haven't tried it before.
It hallucinated how long a scree slope was, made up the existence of a "high rocky knoll", and insisted someone could traverse via a heather slope that's actually non-existent.
Though I still prefer Claude for this since it's better at citing sources.
Maybe for you. There's been a lot of pushback against glasses and video recording.
Was hoping that Google would be able to get the technology there this year for consumers, especially since Meta announced and demoed similar. Seems like Meta is going to be the only game in town for this for the foreseeable future, but I don't trust Meta in the slightest with a device like this from a privacy standpoint nor a platform openness standpoint.
Could be a good use for older hardware. Why not.
Better leaderboard: https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text
And the order of the top players is very different...
For other modes like image generation, the model has a dedicated image head, and is jointly trained.
1. A new Gemini model that is not quantized.
2. A way to connect NotebookLM notebooks to any agents if you pay for the pro subscription.
Flash 3 wasnt appropriately priced, it was priced to get you used to a certain level of spending, then they'll crank it up and get you used to the next level of spending.
Now, we might need to change to DeepSeek 4 Flash if Google deprecates 3 Flash.
Why would you expect text-generator-as-a-service to be any different?
But it's very competitive and significantly faster
this works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYSncx9zLIU
Imo, there's so much room for an actual normie end-product that supercharges local work with AI for regular people (office workers, creatives, etc.), but a VSCode clone ain't it. (Insert: fine, I'll do it myself Thanos meme.)
Nowhere on their marketing copy do they own up to that. Even the majority of the UI screenshots intentionally exclude the full UI look and feel and most are plucked out to not even look contextually like they're part of a greater IDE interface. It very much feels like they want to call it their own and not a fork of VS Code.
But wait, there's more ... you can also view https://antigravity.google/product/antigravity-2 where it's no longer a VS Code fork but now a clone of Claude Desktop!
I think it's a fair to label this all as unoriginal and uninspiring.
I am not sure if they have to explicitly say it's VSCode - do we expect car companies to say "Hey we actually rebadged this to X but it's originally Y" - those who need to know, already know.
95% of people just want to search things and be entertained with their tech. Most dont want to write slop emails at light speed or whatever it is you think AI might be useful for to the average person.
If you consider slopifying your output at a really high velocity "supercharging" then maybe.
There are two usual ways it occurs:
1. Political fights internal to the company resulting in incoherent strategy and products. HN assumes this is almost always the case, and but it's only sometimes the case :).
or
2. A bunch of execs sitting in a room saying stuff like "we have to have a platform with eyeballs that we control where we can surface our AI innovations and tools or else we'll be disintermediated/unable to release stuff that matters" or whatever.
(or both!)
The second part is often a real problem to solve. The first (you have to have a platform) does not follow.
At least two of the main issues with solving these kinds of problems this way (ie antigravity) is:
a. No user actually cares about your strategic problems and isn't interested in helping you. What you release still has to be valuable/etc enough that people are willing to use it over their existing tooling. At least right now, antigravity really isn't.
b. The strategy seems to assume a complete vacuum where it's Google vs existing tools. However, there are tons of large developer companies with the same exact problem of wanting a place they control to surface stuff (or whatever particular problem this is meant to solve). If they opt for the same approach, why would Google's strategy beat them? . If they opt for a different approach, same question.
If you poke there, i suspect you will find nobody has good answers to these questions.
So this approach turns into, at best, skating to where the puck is instead of where it will be.
All 3 major labs streamlined their desktop apps and plans to be the exact same. And we are still doing email drafts as "consumer use cases".
As I'm typing this they are talking about reimagining the search box. They turned it into a chat window.
Truly the pinnacle of innovation.
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/71gAAeSw1URp8QPF/s-l1600.webp
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/tPAAAeSw~RxqBiLR/s-l1600.webp
I think this started to change only in the 1980s and 1990s, thanks to cheaper electronics imported from overseas?
(well, unless we start to bikeshed on the exact meaning of "fully control")
In no uncertain ways, when things come to technogy things are so much better. Linux is awesome nowadays, self hosting is cheap and easy to get into, etc.
How exactly are things worse now in regards to controlling your own devices?
What they can never fix is that plenty of Pro users complain that they never get quota, models are always maxed out. I left, and I can’t believe how much time I wasted in AGY steering Gemini or reminding it that no, you can’t install random new dependencies or disable tests.
It's not the favorite, but it's definitely "working."
> It's constantly overloaded and shits the bed
Or happen avoid all the downtime.
Claude has one 9 of uptime, downtime for me multiple times per week. [1] When it works, it's great. It just doesn't work that often recently.
"Next, our hacker news AI agent reads and comments for you based on your commenting history, no need to think or do anything at all - we'll automate your time wasting and make better, more relevant jokes than you & your karma score will increase exponentially."
Remember HN is mocking the capability/technology itself not the ability of specific firms to survive.
Seems like a stretch, considering it's down 50% compared to a year ago.
I just.. I don't know the mental model of the people who speak like this. What is the point you are trying to make..
and I'm just regurgitating what Google sends me via email and funny things like renaming Vertex AI to "Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform" (not a joke) even though Vertex is mostly used for inference, e.g. Claude via gcloud or fine tuning models etc.
and I use Claude code every day, so I'm not like completely dismissing AI/agentic stuff.
LLMs/RAGs/Transformers are the newish thing that's here to stay.
I've seen my colleagues vocabulary regress from "training transformers" to just "using AI", without clarifying if are using claude or actually building a network. I was recently told that no one says "vibe coding" any more (now it "agentic AI", I was told). My colleague who does ML research was told he was the only one at his workplace that wasn't doing AI.
So the problem isn't the technology (a lot of the technology is great), it's that the discussion around it has been dumbed down by hype.
[1]: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1985-04-rescan
Your writing says a lot about you, too.
Fire. Electricity. The wheel. The printing press. Assembly lines. Flight. The computer. Space exploration.
Anyone else care to contribute?
Edit: Nevermind, parent is an LLM/bot.
Canceled my $20/mo tier.
Two prompts took me into 67% usage. One of those prompts was lost completely and errors out when try to access it.
Gemini users are livid.
Google is trying to kill off the open web here. They tried before, e. g. AMP and what not.
I think it is now time for all of us to help retire Google. This planet can only take some Evil - and Google just exceeded planetary limitations.
$INTC and $GOOG are good buys right now!
But google search has subpar quality for many queries compared to ChatGPT and other AI providers. Even if they did fix the quality issue, nobody has yet got a good way to integrate paid ads within an LLM response.
I'd say those are 2 huge risks to their business.
Seriously though, I'm not sure why Google evolving in this manner precludes them from having a profitable business model. Right now we're subsidizing the costs (probably just a bit) and having ongoing subscription revenue they can increase as needed (particularly in the "google won the race" scenario) will be key before they even have to consider layering advertising on top.
Two years ago everybody was explaining that Google was done, that because of AI search was dead and that they were the IBM or the 2020s for they were absolutely nowhere went it came to AI.
Now we're at a point where a little flash model from Google is SOTA on half of the benchmarks:
https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori...
So the tune changed: Google is now dead not because they'd be nowhere in AI but because they're too good (?) at AI?
So basically: whatever happens, this time for Google it's over right?
(not too clear why it's a 122 Kb .gif file as if the 90s called over dial-up modems while when the same in .webp would be less than half the size but I digress)
Now you want to buy Intel and Google just as I am about to sell it you at 9-10x and at a 3x multiple?