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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 4:42PM

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 Keegan9h

FT: Meta considering “tens of billions” in new capital to fund AI

Just days after Google announced a monster $85 billion upsized equity raise, the extremely profitable Meta is seeking to sell “tens of billions of dollars” in stock, according to a new report from the Financial Times.

Meta is planning on spending between $125 billion and $145 billion on AI capital expenditure this year alone.

Shares dropped more than 5% on the news.

Meta weighs big equity raising after blockbuster Google deal

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Meta is supercharging its subscription businesses

The free-app giant never really cared about recurring revenue. Now, it’s launching paid plans for all sorts of stuff.

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FT: Anthropic staff helping the NSA use Mythos for offensive cyberattacks

Anthropic’s Mythos AI model was deemed too dangerous to release to the public, with the company citing its ability to orchestrate novel cyberattacks.

And that’s just what the National Security Agency is doing, with the help of Anthropic staff embedded at the agency, according to a report from the Financial Times.

Only a small number of companies and US allies have been given access to the advanced model, which means America’s adversaries have not had the chance to shore up their defenses against the AI model’s new offensive capabilities.

The arrangement is especially unusual as the Pentagon has deemed Anthropic’s AI a national security supply chain risk — effectively blacklisting it for defense work — in response to the company’s refusal to allow its technology to be used for any legal application, which could include autonomous killing or mass surveillance. Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the determination.

US National Security Agency using Anthropic’s Mythos for cyber attacks

Rani Molla15h

Longtime Tesla bear JPMorgan upgraded Tesla and raised its price target to $475 from $145

For more than a decade, JPMorgan was Wall Street’s most stubborn Tesla skeptic, anchored by auto analyst Ryan Brinkman’s strict focus on traditional car fundamentals and near-term delivery numbers.

But JPM recently handed coverage of the stock to a new analyst, Rajat Gupta, who is throwing that playbook out the window. In a note Friday, the firm upgraded Tesla to “neutral” from “underweight” and raised its price target 228% to $475 from $145. (The analyst consensus on FactSet is $403.) Instead of focusing on the company’s struggling vehicle business, the new analyst is orienting himself more toward Tesla’s idea of the future, now modeling Tesla’s physical AI and robotaxi fleets all the way out to the year 2040.

Here are the main reasons for the capitulation:

Looking past the car lot: Gupta argues that Tesla “is at the forefront of physical AI, entering uncharted TAMs” and therefore “deserves the benefit of the doubt to be valued on LT earnings potential” rather than near-term speed bumps.
Unmatched vertical integration: Tesla’s control over everything from battery cells to custom silicon gives it a massive moat. JPM notes this starting point advantage is “unmatched at an industrial level scale” and “still somewhat under-appreciated and misunderstood.”
The AWS flywheel effect: Deploying Optimus robots inside its own factories “should not only lower COGS for the base automotive business, but more importantly, help validate the product at an industrial scale.” Gupta called it “a classic flywheel effect, somewhat analogous to AWS and Kiva at AMZN.”

For Tesla bulls who have argued for years that this is an AI company and not a carmaker, JPM’s sudden $3.9 trillion valuation model is the ultimate validation.

Anthropic ponders self-improving AI

Anthropic says Claude already writes 80% of its code. A new post asks what happens when the models can improve themselves — and whether anyone could stop them.

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