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GEMINIVE HAD ENOUGH

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

Google is embracing AI-powered search, squeezing its leading Gemini AI model into pretty much every product it makes, and putting it on your face.

Jon Keegan

5/20/25 3:42PM

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.

Jon Keegan13h

Apple poaches Meta’s chief legal officer

Just a day after Meta announced that it had hired away Apple’s user interface design lead, Apple has announced that it’s poached Jennifer Newstead, Meta’s chief legal officer, to become Apple’s new general counsel. Kate Adams, Apple’s general counsel since 2017, will be retiring late next year.

Apple also announced the retirement of Lisa Jackson, vice president for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, who will leave the company in late January 2026.

The flurry of high-level management changes at Apple happens amid fervent speculation that CEO Tim Cook may be retiring soon.

Apple announces executive transitions

Apple also announced the retirement of Lisa Jackson, vice president for Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, who will leave the company in late January 2026.

The flurry of high-level management changes at Apple happens amid fervent speculation that CEO Tim Cook may be retiring soon.

Jon Keegan16h

EU calls for bids to build “AI gigafactories” in 2026

The European Union wants to shore up its domestic AI infrastructure and reduce its dependence on American tech companies.

To further this goal, the bloc is planning on accepting bids to build EU-based “AI gigafactories,” according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

EU Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen announced that bids would begin in January or February, per the report.

As the AI arms race heats up, countries are racing to secure their own sovereign AI infrastructure, including building their own AI models that reflect their culture and language and offer control over cloud computing resources.

Europe is lagging behind the US and Asia in AI infrastructure. But it may be hard for the EU to fully break free of American tech — unlike the US and China, there is no European alternative for the powerful GPUs needed to train and run AI models. It’s very likely that any AI gigafactories in the EU will be filled with GPUs from Nvidia.

EU to Open Bidding for AI Gigafactories in Early 2026

EU Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy Henna Virkkunen announced that bids would begin in January or February, per the report.

Jon Keegan18h

Google’s AI chip business could be a $900 billion boon for the company

Google may be sitting on a massive new business that it has yet to fully exploit.

Google’s custom tensor processing unit (TPU) AI chips have been getting a lot of attention recently, making the tech world wonder if there are other ways to power its AI dreams rather than just by using Nvidia’s GPUs.

Bloomberg spoke with analysts who estimate that, if it does decide to sell its chips to others, Google could capture 20% of the AI market, making it a $900 billion business. For comparison, Google Cloud pulled in $43.2 billion of revenue last year.

Even if Google just sticks with renting access to its TPUs, it will continue to drive down costs and increase margins as it ekes out performance improvements, such as the 30x improvement in power efficiency that the latest generation of TPUs has delivered for the company.

Alphabet’s AI Chips Are a Potential $900 Billion ‘Secret Sauce’

Rani Molla19h

OpenAI’s Sam Altman has explored bringing his feud with Tesla’s Elon Musk to space

Billionaires, they’re just like us: they want to bring their terrestrial beefs to outer space.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has explored buying or partnering with a rocket company to compete with Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX, The Wall Street Journal reports. The two billionaires have had numerous public feuds over the years that have played out in the courts and on social media. They also both lead AI companies that have insatiable needs for data centers and have publicly discussed building data centers in space.

Altman seems like he thinks this could be more than science fiction. He reportedly reached out to rocket maker Stoke Space to potentially make equity investments in the company to get a controlling stake, though the talks are no longer active, WSJ reports.

Or perhaps he just wanted a Sherwood bobblehead of himself.

Jon Keegan20h

Report: Meta to slash metaverse, VR spending by up to 30%

Four years after changing its name to reflect its focus on the loosely defined “metaverse,” Meta is planning deep cuts to the company’s money-losing virtual reality efforts, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Meta’s Reality Labs division, home to the teams working on metaverse products — which include Quest VR headsets, Horizon Worlds, and its Ray-Ban Meta glasses — has lost about $70 billion since the company started breaking out the unit in 2020.

The company has struggled to get consumers to buy into CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of working and playing in virtual reality worlds, like the company’s Horizon Worlds platform.

Investors seem to love the news of the pivot, as shares shot up as much as 5% in early trading.

Meta’s recent hiring spree of AI superstars from competitors for its Meta Superintelligence Labs shows that the company’s attention is now all in on AI.

Meta’s Zuckerberg Plans Deep Cuts for Metaverse Efforts