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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 Keegan10/17/25

Google’s Gemini 3.0 reportedly due to be released in December

Google is aiming to release the latest version of its flagship AI model, Gemini 3.0, in December, according to a report from Sources.news.

The updated model is expected to make significant gains that should boost it to the top of the leaderboards, according to the report.

The Gemini app also spent some time at the top of the iOS App Store leaderboards, propelled by Google’s Nano Banana image generation model, which proved popular with users looking to turn themselves into action figures. Gemini briefly knocked ChatGPT from the top spot, which is now occupied by OpenAI’s other hot app, Sora.

Recently, there have been signs of ChatGPT downloads slowing, which could provide an opening for Gemini to gain market share. Adding some premium Gemini features to the free tier is a plan under discussion within Google, per Sources.news.

Sources.news also reports that a “small, secretive team” inside Google is working to integrate Gemini into Apple’s operating systems.

Google readies Gemini 3, Perplexity hits its goal

Sources.news also reports that a “small, secretive team” inside Google is working to integrate Gemini into Apple’s operating systems.

Jon Keegan10/17/25

Meta strikes $30 billion deal with Blue Owl to finance Hyperion data center

Meta’s Hyperion mega data center site in Richland Parish, Louisiana, is currently under construction. The city-sized development will be the home to one of the largest data centers in the world, housing around 2 million pricey GPUs, and will scale up to an eventual 5.5 gigawatts.

So, how is Meta planning to pay for this expensive project?

Bloomberg reports that Meta has signed a deal with asset management company Blue Owl Capital to finance $30 billion to pay for the project, marking what could be the largest private capital deal ever.

According to the report, Blue Owl and Meta would co-own the site, with Meta retaining a 20% stake in the project. PIMCO is also part of the financing for the deal, as the anchor lender.

Raising the massive capital to fund all of these huge AI data center projects is pushing companies to use unusual financing arrangements. The Information reported that xAI made such a deal with Valor Equity Partners worth $20 billion to rent the GPUs needed for its Colossus 2 data center.

Blue Owl Seals Largest Private Capital Deal for Meta’s AI Growth

According to the report, Blue Owl and Meta would co-own the site, with Meta retaining a 20% stake in the project. PIMCO is also part of the financing for the deal, as the anchor lender.

Rani Molla10/17/25

EssilorLuxottica surges to record high after saying Ray-Ban Meta glasses helped boost revenue growth

European eyewear company EssilorLuxottica said during its earnings call yesterday that its Ray-Ban Meta glasses helped boost its revenue growth, something that’s sent the ADR up to a record high.

“Clearly, there is a lift coming from Ray-Ban Meta wearables as a product category,” the company’s CFO, Stefano Grassi, said on the call Thursday. “The contribution from Ray-Ban Meta in wearables, as I mentioned before, is in excess of 4 percentage points overall for the group.”

EssilorLuxottica’s revenue was up 11.7% in the third quarter compared with a year ago.

Meta has a nearly 3% stake in the eyewear company, which it has partnered with on the smart glasses. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also claimed that its Ray-Ban Metas are a hit, saying that the “sales trajectory that we’ve seen is similar to some of the most popular consumer electronics of all time.” We looked at the numbers and aren’t so sure.

Tom Jones

ARR you watching?

10/17/25

The revenue race between Anthropic and OpenAI is getting more heated

Hey Claude, when do you think you’ll start making more money than ChatGPT?

44%

Matt Phillips10/16/25

JPMorgan economists estimate that the basket of stocks they use as a rough gauge of AI’s market impact is now worth about 44% of the S&P 500’s total market cap, up from 26% in 2022.

Using a basket of 30 AI stocks picked by the bank’s equity analysts as a barometer of AI, the economists find that American households have seen their aggregate wealth go up by about $5 trillion over the last year as a result of AI, they reported in a note published Thursday.

They also estimate the surge in stock market wealth could raise annualized US consumer spending by some $180 billion, due to wealth effects.

JPM acknowledges some uncertainty around this estimate, noting that the spending impact could be lower “if the wealth gains are accruing disproportionately to upper income households with lower [marginal propensity to spend].”