Google I/O: Gemini everywhere, AI search, glasses, “Google AI Ultra” for $249 a month

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai just wrapped up the two-hour keynote speech at Google’s annual developer conference, “Google I/O,” in the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California.

Maybe the company should just call itself Gemini, based on how often the many variations of the brand were mentioned. By Google’s own count, it was 95 times.

Gemini, the catchall brand for all of Google’s AI products, obviously sits in the center of the company’s roadmap. But that roadmap leads in many different directions, along some weird paths that many regular people might not travel on. But hey, these announcements are aimed at the developers who can think of cool apps we might actually use.

Gemini Pro, App, Flash, Live

• 🤖 The flagship AI product in the Gemini family is Gemini 2.5 Pro. It currently sits atop the popular Chatbot Arena leaderboards, beating out OpenAI’s o3 and ChatGPT 4o models, as well as xAI’s Grok3. Pichai boasted that Gemini recently completed the “Pokemon Blue” video game and that the chatbot had processed 480 trillion tokens in a month, a 50x increase over last year.

Google clearly thinks you should be using Gemini for everything in your life, and it’s going to jam it into pretty much every Google product you use.

The new feature that most people are actually going to see all the time is the new AI-powered Google Search.

• 🔎 Search is getting an “AI mode” button, which lets you type in extra long detailed queries for complicated searches. Behind the scenes, “a multitude” of “fan-out” queries go collect all the information you need from different sources, and it’s packaged together for you with maps, highlights, and photos.

Gemini 2.5 is jammed into that too, it seems. It will also be in Chrome. It’s just going to be everywhere.

• 👁️ There’s also the Gemini app. That will let you do something called “Gemini Live,” which used to be called “Project Astra” (they also mentioned something called “Search Live”), which turns on your camera and lets you ask Gemini questions about what’s in front of you. This was genuinely helpful in a demo they showed for the technology helping a musician with a vision disability see everything around him. But the other demo just showed off how it would be able to tell you that your shadow is not a person, and that a garbage truck is not a convertible.

• 🌅 The Gemini app also has access to Google’s Imagen 4 model for improved image generation (and better text) and Veo 3 for video generation with sound effects in case you need a short clip of an old fisherman reading a few lines of dialogue with splashes in the background. Who doesn’t?!

• 🎥 After making lots of weird, short AI videos, you can now edit them together in Google Flow, an AI-powered video editor.

• 📝 It will generate... quizzes? By sifting through all of your personal data, the model can infer your interests and tailor educational quizzes to your hobbies.

• 💵 And if you absolutely need to have every last one of these AI features, you can now pay either $19.99 per month for Google AI Pro or $249 per month(!) for Google AI Ultra.

Agent mode

• 🕵 Yes, “agentic AI” is the buzzword of the moment, and Google is no exception. What used to be known as “Project Mariner” has now been dubbed Agent Mode. This new feature does have great potential, as it can go out on the web, fill out forms for you, and take care of the most annoying work of being online. This agentic behavior will be available for developers to tap into, and like Microsoft, it will work with Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol.

Android XR glasses

• 👓 The other big thing announced for developers is Android XR, which is a framework for all things VR, AR, and everything in between. This is meant to be used for bringing Gemini to a wide range of face computers.

They showed a slightly glitchy live demo of new Android XR glasses that seemed to do a lot of what Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses do, like showing you notifications, performing translations, and answering questions about the things in front of you.

Google is partnering with Samsung and eyeglass retailers like Warby Parker and Gentle Monster to develop a range of Android XR-powered glasses.