Subscriber Q&A: Live @ Google I/O

0:00Alex Heath:I'm here at Google I.O. with the Shoreline A &M Theater in Mountain View. I go to I.O. every year. Cheer-going, dependent on my own with sources. And have a few interesting conversations lined up today. Some on the record, some not. And just out of the keynote with some R and SM whole Google career. I took some notes, and I figured I would go through what stood out to me. Just as someone who has been following Google for a really long time, reporting on it, has been to I.O. a bunch, and is closely tracking what Google is doing in it, I thought there was a lot of interesting stuff there. And also, if you have questions, unless you watch the keynote, I've probably not seen everything that was announced.

0:51Alex Heath:So if you're stand-up, there may not be questions. there are in the chat here and if not when the video goes out after you can follow up to the video to the email and I'll see your question to try and answer that I'll have a full issue in source breaking down everything from Google today and some of the interviews and conversations I've been including a question at a press Q &A yet, which I'll get to in a second. I just wanted to go through things that stood out to me at the keynote, and again, if you had any questions about I.O. or things you want me to ask the Google executives here while I'm here, speaking with a lot of them.

1:38Alex Heath:Again, some I'm not, but still questions, but ask them I'm here all day. Yeah, it's really interesting. they're wrapping around how big Google is. Every time I come here and they do this, like, you know, Sumner does it at the beginning. They mine the world, the scale that they're operating at. So they're now 13 products with over 1 billion users, each five with more than 3 billion, which is the most users of any company on Earth as far as I know. Sumner was definitely bragging about CapEx this year. who's talking about the right bump in capex and AI spend, which I think is something you do when, you know, your stock price has gone up as high as Google's has.

2:21Alex Heath:And they're kind of through that trough of disillusionment period they had, I would say, about a year ago, where everyone was wondering if Search was going to be totally destroyed by Chagipitier, if Gemini was going to be able to pull to the frontier against OpenAire Ananthropic. And, you know, they won the antitrust lawsuit. Like, you see everything kind of reflected in their stock price. So there was a bit of, like, bravado to that. I noticed a lot of TPU talk, I think an unusual amount of TPU talk out of Starr at the beginning of the keynote for IO. I mean, IO is a very consumer developer conference.

2:53Alex Heath:So, you know, they've talked about TPUs in the past. But I think to me, the sun post of that is, you know, there's a big focus on TPU, expanding TPU outside of even Google's own properties, which you're seeing with Anthropic and others. And really, you know, I'm reminded of the old Bezos quote, you know, your margin is my opportunity. And I think Google sees NVIDIA's margin and sees that as an opportunity. They remain, Google remains compute constrained with TPUs. You know, people internally are still fighting like hell over TPU allocation, and they're still going to sell them externally because they think it's a smart business group.

3:33Alex Heath:And it probably is, but just interesting to see a place to prominent, the TPU be a prominent thing at I.O. this year. um and yeah everyone who's joining uh no hey hey jordan um does it feel like this is an endless game of frog is from jordan where whichever company is announced most recently has the most advanced stuff or is google or anyone doing something truly innovative um good question i mean i had a scoop in the newsletter last week that gem night 3.5 which they announced today was was going to put them back in kind of the benchmark area of gpt 5.5 and just 4.7 that it wasn't going to um necessarily push them ahead of the frontier and that that is the case you know the sources are good as always um yeah it is this constant aim of like the rat race i think with ai although today and that's again something you do when we're not pushing the frontiers google didn't really talk much about benchmarks uh at all i mean they talked about the age use they talked about um you know improvements in coding but i think where they see their edge is the scale kind of connecting everything together and the thing i was going to get to next the thing they have is that they are playing to win on the consumer front with gemini it's very clear you see it in the product direction.

4:54Alex Heath:Gemini's at 900 million monthly active users, which is putting it in the same kind of par as ChatGPT. So it's really a two-horse race for consumer AI right now between ChatGPT and Gemini. And you're seeing a lot of consumer out-to-proc velocity on the Gemini stuff. Jot Woodward, who is the head of product for Gemini and the Gemini app, is really a rising star inside Google. He had a lot of time on stage today going through different Gemini use cases. I would say the biggest headline besides the new model is they announced Gemini Spark, which is basically their answer to OpenClaw for mummies, which I was waiting to see which big tech company would do this first and given the cadence of how conferences are, I guess it made sense that Google would be first.

5:44Alex Heath:It's interesting. It remains to be seen how powerful it is. People need to get access to it. But what's impressive is they have it hooked up to Google Cloud. So it's a 24-7 personal GCP instance to power one of these things. So Sundar even made a joke about you don't have to open your laptop. So solving a lot of the complexity that OpenClaw and Hermes and all these other agents that people have skunk working together has done. And it's kind of interesting that Google got to that, you know, OpenClaw for Normies thing before OpenAI, which acquired the founder of OpenClaw, the claw father, Peter Steinberger.

6:26Alex Heath:So I assume OpenAI will have something on this front very soon. But yeah, the demo today with Gemini Spark was, you know, this personal agent taking action 24-7, integration with Google tools, but also, I think really importantly, integration and via MCP that's coming to anything that can connect into MCP. I think Google will verify. Will MCP? That's important because it signals that they know Gemini isn't a thing that they can just date fully to Google's properties. They want this to really be this universal assistant. And they were stressing that it works on iOS, it works on Android. They've got the Mac app for Gemini, which actually looks pretty good.

7:06Alex Heath:I'm excited to try it. And obviously all the Android integrations that go much deeper. But I think Google is really not only playing to win on the assistant side, on the chat GPT side, but on this open claw kind of personal agent side. And the demo Josh word showed was firing off multiple tasks in parallel via voice, having it change a calendar, send an email to someone, create a digest and a deep research type report, all doing that in parallel. and i think they're gating spark to a hundred dollar a month ultra plan or i'm not be calling it ultra google remains the most confusing company in the world with how it names things um and i don't think that's going to change anytime soon um but yeah i would say gemini is definitely the standout in terms of they're just going full tilt on the product side um so another question here eli what's up uh was the model they announced specialized to any use thinking how mythos has its specific strength that made it noteworthy okay good segue into my conversation also with sundar yesterday um which i'll have in the newsletter uh yesterday not really a conversation it was a we made that i asked the question it but um yeah they're really focusing on tool use so like the gem tick use the ability which is what all the labs are doing you know the ability to like control a computer there's a demo where the new the gemini mac app was like controlling the mac um which like apple doesn't have anything like that and it's kind of interesting to Google, staring out on a Mac at one of their conferences.

8:37Alex Heath:They have a cyber thing that they talked about, but they're still behind Mythos, I think, on general capability in terms of what they've released. Now, it was interesting. I asked Sundar about this during this press Q &A yesterday, and I haven't published his answer to me yet. I was saving it just for you guys on the live stream here. I asked him how Mythos, if at all, has reset Google's expectation of what it means to beat the frontier. And he basically said that he thinks Google has the capability of Mythos internally as well, which I thought was interesting, which to me suggests. I mean, and this is evident in the evidence in the way that Anthropik is gating access to Mythos, which, you know, they'll say is a security concern, which I do think that's true.

9:23but I also think they're compute constrained and you can see it in the cost of mythos like it's

9:28Alex Heath:incredibly expensive to run and I think maybe you know everything that Google was doing with its models today was about you know efficiency it was the flash version it was like bragging about how much token spend savings companies could get if they switched to Gemini flash and yeah I don't know it was it was it was interesting to see um sundar's response to that because i i don't feel like they had anything at io today that actually they were messaging the same ballpark as mythos now i understand that google has this kind of data problem internally with coding which all the labs are struggling with aside from it seems like anthropic but there's this data flywheel thing that Sundar was saying in response to my question that they're working on, where they're trying to combine anti-gravity, which is Google's kind of cloud code competitor, codex competitor, that is obviously like a third horse in that rate.

10:27Alex Heath:If he forced his fist, I think you've got to curse her ahead of him probably too. But they're trying to, they're basically finding that using that internally with their own engineers is helping them hopefully catch up on the coding data flyer. But I still think it's an issue. I still think they're not anywhere near OpenAI and tropic on code. At least it doesn't seem like it. I think they would have been beating their chest more in the keynote today. But that said, I mean, 3.5, I was interested to see Gemini 3.5, that it was... Oh, and by the way, if everyone's new here, people new, ask a question, and I'll answer it.

11:01Alex Heath:I'm just asking people questions and ranting about what I saw today at Google I.O. I just got out of the keynote. um uh gemini 3.5 flash um there was a moment where sundar was talking about and it's one of these kind of fake made up you know marketing numbers but uh the token spend that companies are spending on some of these more expensive closed model you know for other frontier models it could just thematically cut if they switch to flash it would give them the same kind of results so google push really hard on efficiency and you know a conversation i've been having a lot lately is that a lot of people inside companies that are spending a ton of money on tokens know that a huge amount of this spend is incredibly wasteful, right?

11:42Alex Heath:There's token maxing. There's literally contests just to build things and have engineers max out their token budgets. And people know that this is a bit of a bubble in terms of token spend, at least at these prices. I think Google probably recognizes that. They probably feel that internally, if I had to guess. And they're going hard at it on the Gemini 3.5 flash side. So that was a standout, too, in terms of differentiation with the model approaches this year. Okay, question from Kate. Very few details from Demis about Gemini for science. Do you know more? Yeah, that was kind of an interesting one.

12:14Alex Heath:That was the closer was Demis came back out. Also a sign about the power dynamic inside Google right now. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but Sundar would usually come out and do the closing. Thank you for coming. They closed with Demis today. and I think that just shows his clout continues to rise inside Google, not that it needed to rise anymore. But yeah, he came out to close with this kind of this Gemini for science tease and had some kind of big quote about how we're at the footsteps of the singularity or whatever. I'm not really sure, to be honest. Yeah, there were very few details. I'll definitely be asking the Google executives I'm seeing today about that.

12:53Alex Heath:I can report back on that. you know science is something that demis has been very focused on he's been long talking about ai's potential to accelerate scientific discoveries he's got isomorphic labs is uh you know uh ai health science spinoff company that google's also um funding so i think tbd but it just seems like that's a strong area that he wants to double down on but i'll definitely ask more about that Okay, another question. In terms of timeline, when do you think the other labs release their own claw, OpenAI, meta? I mean, OpenClaw exists. You can use your ChatGPT account to access it.

13:34Alex Heath:Is Codex an OpenClaw competitor? You could argue it kind of is. It's definitely easier to use than OpenClaw. I don't know. I still haven't seen it. Open claw, I say for normies, and that's not meant to be derogatory, but like you don't need to understand coding at all. You don't even need to have a concept of these frameworks that we're talking about with slide code and codex. I haven't seen that from a company as large as Google until today, right, with what Gemini Spark is. I'm sure others will fast follow. And I know Meta is working on it. I bet that'll probably not be until September to connect time for them.

14:15Alex Heath:OpenAI has their conference in September, but they move fast. I would imagine they'll have more open-claw side before them. But TBD, I mean, Google came out strong today with Gemini Spark. Another one from Jordan. Yeah, everyone. Hi, I'm just taking a few questions briefly here at Google I.O. I just got out of the keynote. Anthropic kicked a little sanded I.O. with Andre Carpathie announcing that he's joined today. Oh, actually, I don't see that he said at Google. I mean, if he had been a co-founder of Google, yeah. It's more of a kicking stand to OpenAI, for sure. You can't have AI Labs not announcing things on IO Day, okay?

14:55Alex Heath:I remember when I was here, I think it was two years ago, Ilya left OpenAI officially, and we were all at the press happy hour, and we all had to set our books down and go file. So there's always going to be some kind of AI drama on the day, That is just like, that's as sure as the sun rises. But yeah, Andre, I'll have that in the newsletter later today too. Really interesting move to have him go to Anthropic. I reported on X earlier for those who didn't see it. He's going to work on the pre-training team and he's going to build a team that is using Claude itself to build their models, the pre-training.

15:31Alex Heath:So this recursive self-improvement concept that's really taking hold in a lot of the labs, Andre's going to Anthropic to work on. I'm not a sports dad, but I've been seeing a lot of, you know, Katie to the Warriors, you know, memes about that move today. Okay. I feel like I've got enough unless there's any more questions. This was an experiment. I haven't done one of these before. I'm thinking, as I said at the top, for those who missed it, I go to a lot of these events in person, these big tech conferences, and, you know, do the written newsletter usually after. But, you know, SubSec has this live thing.

16:06Alex Heath:Why not try it? Why not take questions? You all helped me kind of inform what I'm asking out and talking to sources about. So this is an experiment. We'll see if I do it again. I just wanted to pop on here and say hello and talk a little bit about Google. But yeah, I'm going to jump back into things. Oh, one last thing. Google Glasses. They showed off the audio on the glasses with Joto Monster and Warby Parker towards the end. I'm going to be interviewing Rick Osteolo Google's SVP of devices and platform and Android and all that in like 20 minutes so I'll be asking him all about that so stay tuned for more on Google's AI hardware Android etc.

16:50Alex Heath:Chrome strategy in the newsletter that'll be all thank you everyone alright peace

17:03Thank you.