Google I/O: Day 1 Reactions, Goldman to Lead SpaceX IPO | Diet TBPN

0:02John Coogan:We're both in suits today. I like it. It looks good. Some people have been saying they can't tell us apart. Is that what you're saying? That. OK. But people have been saying I need something like a swear jar. OK. When I don't wear a suit. Oh, OK. I'd like that. So so, yeah, something to consider. It should probably be a pretty big jar. 20 bucks to the OpenAI nonprofit. That's what you got to do. No, we were in Unheard. I mean, we can pull up the full post later in the show, but it's funny. I mean, it's a good analysis of what we've taken from ESPN, what works about live streaming. This is from Alice Key.

0:40John Coogan:My latest for Unheard is on why tech shows like TVPN are rerunning the sports media playbook invented by ESPN and why it's working. They're hard to tell apart in their matching suits and floppy haircuts. I don't know if that's good or bad, But we don't always have matching suits. Usually, Jory's the casual one. But yesterday, we were both casual. Today, we're both in suits. We do still get the brother thing a lot. But I think it's a term of endearment. I think it's positive. Anyway, we have to react to Google I.O., of course. There's a whole bunch of announcements, some really exciting stuff, some stuff that people are having mixed reactions to.

1:15John Coogan:We'll take you through it all. But first, we need to watch this video about this humanoid robot. Ramp? Why is Ramp? No, I'm kidding. No, I'm crying. Watch this video. Let's get some. You got to go to the beginning. You're spoiling it. You got to go to the beginning. Doing pretty well. Moving pretty quickly. A little bit of a, oh, catches itself. Catches itself. Not bad. Not bad. Okay. Seems like a full recovery. Seems like you're ready to go. I'm liking it. And then.

1:50John Coogan:Not good. And then I wonder what it's thinking, because you would think that there would be some programming. Oh, they got to cut the music. They got to cut the music. Don't let the music keep playing while your boy's down. It just gets carried off like this. It's so crazy to just carry it off like this. Anyway, singularity delayed. Yeah, it's possible that the robot died from embarrassment. Yeah, or maybe it was damaged. It's possible that as it hit the ground, it was just actually taken out. Anyway, Google I.O. A bunch of different announcements. Brandon Gurell on our team posted on the TBPN newsletter some reactions, sort of bucketed it into four key areas.

2:30John Coogan:Intelligent eyewear. This is an interesting one. I want to go into this. Gemini Omni. We talked about the videos. We played a little bit of that yesterday. Upgrades to Gemini LLMs. Those have been mixed reactions from developers. We'll go through that. And then anti-gravity, which is an interesting place with an interesting history. So let's start with intelligent eyewear. If you had to pick Warby Parker, Gentle Monster. Have you heard of Gentle Monster before? I've heard of Warby Parker. I know the story. I'm a fan of the business story. That's super familiar. I haven't worn glasses in a very long time, so I'm not really in the market.

3:00John Coogan:But the Warby Parkers, I've always enjoyed the way they thought about the brand. And I've also been impressed by the way they built that business. They were early to the D2C boom. And then didn't some of the founders move over to Harry's? Is that the same team? Or is that a different thing I'm thinking of? They were certainly, when I think of D2C, I think of Warby. Yeah. I think of Allbirds. Yeah. I think of Everlane. Yes. But when you think of the last two out of those three, the market caps are sub$100 million. Allbirds was trading at, what,$20 million or something and then spiked because of the AI thing.

3:32John Coogan:But Allbirds, Everlane, not really sustainable businesses. Warby Parker, on the other hand, current market caps. Allbirds has pretty much been. Sitting at$3.5 billion. Allbirds has pretty much been down only. Down only. Since the pump, the AI pump. On their NeoCloud, no surprises there. Well, have they given us an update on how they are rolling out Kubernetes, how it's going, building their NeoCloud? Did they get allocation? Are they racking Cerebris? Are they racking GB200s? What are they racking, and how fast are they getting power? It would be funny if Jensen ends up having to talk about Allbirds on the earnings call today.

4:11Didn't they? There's a new. Yeah.

4:12John Coogan:Didn't they also fully rebrand the name? Was it going to be like Bird AI or All AI? Yeah, so Allbirds still exist, but they basically kept the public entity, and that's what they're building, the NeoCloud there. Fun. Lots of fun. Warby Parker, resilient. I mean, in 2021, it was a$6 billion company. Now it's a$3 billion company. Not the best scenario, but surprisingly resilient, I think, in a time when a lot of people wrote off a lot of the standalone direct-to-consumer was like either get rolled into a bigger company or go or like face the fate of the public markets. But Warby Parker has a deal with Google and Samsung.

4:54John Coogan:Google says we're partnering with Samsung, Gentle Monster, and Warby Parker on new intelligent eyewear. Here's a sneak peek at two designs from this fall's upcoming collections. and people are, I like featurenomics from Sam, kind of crazy that you can wear your favorite Mag 7 on your face now. You can. The gentle monster one does a really good job of hiding the camera. I imagine that it will have a light to tell you if it's recording, but if someone wore these from a distance, also meta Ray-Bans have done sort of the hard work of becoming the first face computer. So when you see Ray-Bans and they're a little thick, you start immediately thinking, oh, should I be looking for a camera lens?

5:36John Coogan:Am I being recorded? But the gentle monster design, that silhouette, doesn't scream technology. It doesn't scream wearable face camera. And so these are going to be a little bit more stealthy. Warby Parkers look nice, but the camera pump on this, you zoom in on the Warby Parker one? You know, it makes a lot of sense that the Googles and the Metas have to go and partner on different silhouettes. My expectation, my uninformed expectation is that Apple will just make Apple glasses, right? They will probably, it's hard to see them taking the route at least early on of partnering and allowing another company to influence the design language.

6:19But it makes a lot of sense that Meta would partner with Luxottica. Okay, first look at the camera bump on this.

6:26John Coogan:If you zoom in as far as you can, I don't know if we can zoom in any further, but the camera is actually not flush with the frames. It's actually protruding a little bit. Yeah, you can see it right there. Interesting design choice. I wonder how that will catch the light, how that will reflect in the real world. But this was all from a joke from Abdu says, okay, so Apple has Carl Zeiss, Meta has Ray-Bans and Oakley. Google has Gentle Monster and Warby Parker. or boring, which company is going to be bold enough to slap wearable technology into some 3M safety glasses? Would you rock these, Jordy?

6:59John Coogan:I like those. 3M safety glasses. You know what I'm talking about, right? You're working with a buzzsaw. I do know. Dust in your eyes. But these look cool. These are sporty. I'm much more likely to just commit to the bit. Just go full clanker. If I'm going to be wearing a face computer. Full cyberpunk. Full clank. Yeah, full clank out. Full cyberpunk. I think that might be the move. I don't know. For some company, a challenger company could potentially do that, maybe friend or something. Anyway, what else? So Warby Parker traded down on the news, which Shiel Monaut was surprised by. Why is Warby Parker down 14 %?

7:30John Coogan:They announced a partnership at Google I.O. that's been in the works for a while. Is it because they aren't available yet? And our friend Rat King, Mike Isaac, says, okay, Google AI glasses with Warby Parker are officially coming for meta Ray-Bans. Google also said it would bring Gemini to glasses this fall with Samsung Electronics and the eyewear companies, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. The glasses, which work similarly to Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, come with a camera, microphone. Yeah. At what point does Google just buy Warby Parker? Right. It's a three billion dollar company. It's actually done quite well.

8:01Yeah. Over the last over the last six months. It's up 43 percent in the last six months, although it's been almost flat this year. I would say I expect that smart glasses are going to have product market fit among people that need to wear glasses first, right? If you already have to wear glasses all day long for your vision, why not throw some smart features in there? It's going to be harder to get someone that doesn't need glasses to add a new device to their rotation, right?

8:31John Coogan:Yeah. And so, you know, Warby Parker's done quite well and has been surprisingly resilient. but they have incredible distribution, and I wouldn't be surprised if they get sniped at some point. I mean, deeper integration into a traditional, I don't know, like workflow. A lot of the Google I.O., we'll get into this, but it was talking about Spark, the personal AI assistant. And when I think about... It's in Spark. It's in Anticrack. I know, I know. Oh, just look in Omni. Yeah, there's a lot of names. It's Google. There's a lot of products. you're referring to, of course, Nathan Clark's post. It's in Gemini.

9:10John Coogan:Just created an AI studio. Oh, it's for your personal Google account. For Workspace, you need Gemini Business. No, not Gemini Advanced. That's AI Pro now, unless you need AI Ultra. Oh, agents? You do that in Spark, actually. No, not Gemini API. Manage it. And it's the typical meme. The interesting thing is that I do think Meta Ray-Bans, it was always like, okay, you have a deep integration with WhatsApp. you have a deep integration with Instagram, DMs, maybe Facebook Messenger, some people are still using that. But in terms of like wiring into your life, there are way more people that see Google Docs, Gmail as like the central node in their personal life.

9:49John Coogan:Like people think of like my, all the stuff I have saved on the desktop of my MacBook is like my core repository. A lot of people think, okay, for the important stuff, I'll put it in Google Docs or Google Drive, and then most things flow through Gmail, most things flow through iMessage. There are some people that just are like, yeah, WhatsApp is the number one screen time for me. That's where I really organize things, but Meta doesn't really have this knock-on effect of like, oh, yes, it's not necessarily an enterprise-level productivity suite, but there are people who are like, yeah, I'm using Apple mail, iMessage.

10:28John Coogan:I save my files in Apple files, the cloud storage I use, my camera roll is super important. So an AI agent running through the Apple ecosystem can be valuable, and an AI agent running through the Google ecosystem can be valuable. The meta smart glasses, it's a little bit trickier to go and do anything because you're just sort of bumping up against the walled gardens, right? Yeah. But investor Nick doesn't like them for aesthetic reasons. He says, these Google X Warby Parker glasses are horrific looking compared to these meta Ray-Bans. Someone is probably going to lose their job over this. I don't know that they look that much worse.

11:06John Coogan:I don't know. Ray-Bans are a very iconic silhouette and they do look good. So we'll see. We'll see how the response goes. I think from a product perspective, there's obviously fertile ground on the flip side. The Wayfarer is just such an iconic. It's more iconic than anything what Warby Parker has produced. And that's just sort of the reality of brand building over a decade versus a century or something like that, however long Ray-Ban's been around a long time. Anyway, Genie 3. You can now simulate real places by grounding Genie 3 experiences with street view imagery. Google is sitting on a mother load of real world data.

11:44John Coogan:I was always thinking YouTube was gonna be so valuable for Omni and VO3, VO4 maybe in the future. I hadn't considered Street View as a trove of data. Demis seems very data-pilled. He seems, a lot of the Mag7 CEOs seem very data-pilled. There's the story about Mark Zuckerberg screen recording or logging all the computer use from all the meta employees. These important troves of data are increasing in value and Street View certainly seems like it's one of them. This is cool. I wonder how interactive this will be, how this actually instantiates into a game. It's a great demo. What does it take to be able to get on this?

12:23Yeah, or do they allow people to build games on top of this?

12:26John Coogan:Yeah, I just think about, I don't know. I mean, Demis has a background in games, and he was sort of alluding to the fact that he might go back into games at some point or at least be able to, like, scratch that itch again. Famously, he wrote a programmatic code to generate vomit in a roller coaster simulator. very fun story but again when I think about Roller Coaster Tycoon which was not I think I don't think he was actually working on that game there's a similar theme park simulator but we are moving back into the simulator world but the mechanic is what is so enticing to gamers often when I think about the games that I've spent a long time with some of them have incredible graphics triple-a graphics some of them have 2d graphics but the mechanic is great and so that is what It gets me to keep coming back.

13:11The legend Bobby Chipman in the X-Chats says, can't wait for smart glasses to fully replace my monitors.

13:18John Coogan:Yeah, maybe you'll need augmented reality or something. MetaRayBan display, certainly going that direction. The Orion. I've been surprised. Wasn't the first episode we ever did we were talking about Orion, and they still haven't shipped it, right? I mean, they shipped the smaller version, the MetaRayBan displays, which have sort of the Call of Duty HUD. It's not full augmented reality. I was expecting, I was expecting, I mean, we've demoed the Orion headset and it has a bit of a narrow field of view, but it really can put a screen right in front of you. And I assumed that everyone was saying, it's really expensive, it's clunky, it's not ready for prime time, but look at how fast things are going.

13:54John Coogan:In a year, maybe two, we'll get it. And maybe that's coming at the next MetaConnect. Maybe this summer we'll see it, but haven't been that many rumbles on it. And then obviously the massive pitch shift to AI CapEx might have taken a backseat. I don't know. I'm certainly hopeful. I like AR and VR. I think we're overdue for a new fun product. I'm still waiting for the next Apple Vision Pro, Apple Vision Air, something just lighter. That's all I want. Cheaper, maybe, but lighter and same screen. Screen was great. Anyway, Gemini Flash 3.5 looks pretty neat, according to Tenebris and extremely fast, but still largely the sort of incremental progress we've come to expect from Google.

14:36John Coogan:generally a pretty disappointing IO. Now, what's interesting is that Gemini 3 felt like a new base pre-train, felt like it had some of that big model smell, felt like it was, you know, really delightful to talk to. And I think a lot of people were expecting Gemini 4 here. We're still waiting for the next iteration here. And also - Yeah, we're still waiting for Pro. Yeah, Pro isn't out. But people are speculating that 3.5 Pro won't necessarily be a new pre-train. And so it seems like there's a little bit of research being at odds with the product cadence. Like Google I.O. is scheduled probably like two years in advance.

15:13John Coogan:And whether or not the training run finishes on time is a little bit harder to package up and nail on a specific time. We see this with the independent labs or the OpenAI, Anthropic, the other labs, XAI. Like they're launching models very much like when they're done and then they will like instantiate like something that looks like a conference around it or maybe a video or a blog post, a model card. But if you're if you're grinding towards a specific date and a specific model isn't quite ready, you come out with something that looks a little bit more incremental. People were really, really honing in on the fact that the cutoff date was January of 2025.

15:52John Coogan:Right. Was that was that the date that or was it December of 2025? Either way, yeah, I don't know. I don't know how much cutoff dates matter because, you know, all these models, you know, can query the web and get updates. Yeah, overall reactions from developers across the board were not good. Not good at all. Yeah, Prakash here has it. Underwhelming. Cursor ranked it on CursorBench. It is below Composer 2. Is that a fair thing? I mean, I'd like to see you rank another live stream on TBPN Bench. It doesn't match up. You know? It's like... No, I mean, they have all the other frontier models. And some of them are ahead of Cursor's own models on Cursor Bench.

16:41It's just one data point. But yeah. Yeah, yeah. But here's the other thing. It's four times... It underperforms Composer 2, even though it's roughly four times more expensive. Interesting. Interesting.

16:52John Coogan:Yeah. I feel like for a long time, Google's positioning was frontier or near frontier, but best possible pricing. And this marks sort of a shift in the strategy, perhaps. Yeah. Overall, it's starting to make more and more and more sense why Google has put so much capital and resources behind Anthropic. Yeah. Prakash says, seems to indicate that DeepMind is constrained by data rather than compute for what they intend to do. Hence, the TPU sales. rest of Google now shipping their org chart. Ben Thompson talked about that a little bit. And there was some context on like, you know, we were asking the question like, will there be AI fatigue from stuffing AI in every product surface area?

17:34John Coogan:Allie K. Miller shares one of the loudest applauses in the entire Google keynote. Nishtha put on the gentle monster plus Gemini glasses, tapped the side to summon Gemini, and all in one prompt said, take a photo and put a cartoon blimp in the sky that says Google I.O. 2026, and within seconds, the preview of the edited photo from Nanobanana appeared on her watch. I want to spend less time on screens. AI is really coming everywhere, and so much is driven by voice AI as the interaction mode. Very cool demo, impressive technology, but Greg's gadget says these companies truly have no idea what regular people want, because, yeah, that is a little bit of a niche use case.

18:15John Coogan:You need to be more creative with it for when you would actually use that, because this is a very it's a perfect demo of the product and the functionality but it lacks that like creative spark of like yes i did want a picture of that on my wrist at that key moment in time uh if you're not doing a demo his point is that regular people would not be excited about that particular feature right spacex ipo we're getting more details by the day the other the other thing the other thing that is uh was going pretty viral the last thing on io uh was that uh Google anti-gravity team flashed a codex folder in their actual demo video.

18:53Gurgly says, I had to do a double take in the second minute of the launch video for anti-gravity. You can see people use codex on the anti-gravity team. Did no one double check the launch video at the very least. Not a huge surprise. Obviously, anti-gravity looks, a lot of people were saying, looks quite like codex. So clearly, they're inspired. More than windsurf?

19:13John Coogan:I feel like it would be like a way they would have just rebuilt Windsurf. I don't know. We'll have to see. No. So but anyways, this isn't a huge surprise, right? Google's been using a bunch of anthropic models. Clearly, they're using a ton of different models and products internally. What was that drama with Steve Yege going back and forth with Demis about like what what teams are using what models and stuff? There was a big back and forth, a big dust up on the timeline like a month ago about whether or not Google's employees were deploying AI efficiently or broadly. Some of them aren't and some of them are.

19:49John Coogan:And Demis chimed in and said, like, this is just complete wrong and everyone's using AI. I don't know. It goes back and forth. There's also people are benchmarking OmniFlash, which looked amazing when we saw the videos. There were a few, like, little quirks. Some people in the chat were saying that the firing order of the V8 was not correct. Maybe it was only a V6. Yeah, it was missing two cylinders. It was missing two cylinders. But it looked good to me. I don't know. But now people are actually comping it to C-Dance 2.0, which obviously has much looser content restrictions. Because I guess just like Hollywood can't file a lawsuit in China?

20:25John Coogan:I'm not exactly sure how that works. Because C-Dance seems to be available in America. It seems like maybe... Oh, I think Chinese businesses have been relatively immune to U.S. copyright law for a very, very, very long time. And it also might just take, like, years to file a lawsuit, do discovery, actually go through and litigate. Oh, yeah. You can just go, like, there's malls in China where you can go to a Nike store. Yeah. And Nike has nothing to do with it. Yeah. And yet all the products. They've been selling Swatch APs over there for decades. Yeah, just ask Rolex and Patek how they're... Sure, sure.

21:02John Coogan:Yeah, I've heard fake cars too. Like you can get a full replica of like a G-Wagon that's just made in a factory and then you could buy it, bring it over here and you take it to a Mercedes dealership and they're just like, this is not a Mercedes. But it looks like one, like, you know, to the millimeter from the outside. But internally, it's just, it's just frauding. Anyway, CDance 2.0 looks great. OmniFlash looks great as well. These are both super useful. We'll see how they actually play out and how they get implemented, how they get used. The interesting thing will be like, at what point, it still takes a long time to generate videos, very hard to get them right.

21:40John Coogan:The last 90, like we're at 99 % fidelity, but when you click in, you start noticing little details. When will we be in a paradigm where you ask a question and you actually get an explainer video, six minutes, 10 minutes, like you would on YouTube? Very computationally expensive, very difficult to maintain the logic. Like what is the deep research report of OmniFlash? These 8 second, 10 second, 20 second videos are impressive, but not perfectly substitutable for a 20 minute YouTube video because of the time and the level of detail that you can go into. Some people that are looking for information about a V8 engine, they want a breakdown that lasts 20 minutes.