Google I/O Thoughts?

Google has "demoed" dozens of seemingly world-changing products that lead nowhere (remember Google Duplex?). It's impossible to ascertain from an event like this the extent to which demos are cherrypicked or faked entirely.

Underwhelming so far, everything is disjointed and is months away from being available via labs.

Always enjoy the possibilities that I/O shows

Other impressive things:

- "where did I leave my glasses?" (live video feed with memory)

- asking for a summary across emails / meetings

- agent demos (like handling all the steps to return shoes, building physics learning examples based on user provided preference "basket ball")

- "why is my record player doing this?" (ask question while recording video, get genAI response with links)

- Google Workspace Gemini Panel (like that it sits on the side rather than taking over the UX)

- Build a JSON object of books & authors from a picture of a bookshelf

- Context caching for model calls (saves sending large amounts of text for every call)

Google Astra seems like it will be the foundation for a number of next gen capabilities

Looks great, but I've become skeptical of Google demos and as such will believe it only after I've used it :)

My thoughts:

- Is this the first I/O that released _zero_ new hardware?

- Very very sad to see them make EVERYTHING in this conference about Gemini

- Google video search is crazy interesting

- Google Search being AI-first is definitely not.

Google is becoming a Toyota. Useable, but utterly behind.

It feels a bit like this tech event I've always been looking forward to died to be honest. IO was always cool, you could always see general product updates, but this year seems to be AI only. Half of the talks/videos will also be AI focussed, it's a bummer because it's always a source to learn new SDKs or design ideas through them.

All the video understanding and agentic stuff (if it actually works at low-enough latency in real life) is very impressive.

Put this on a robot, call it Jeeves, and it becomes a pretty cool personal assistant :)

I used to look forward to it. I liked Google positioning with its Pixel line up, their prosumer software and what they cooked in the lab (AI, Project Starline)

Now I don't even bother navigating through the announcements that are never launched, the fake demos, the tiptoeing around every potential issue... What a shame.

This one is worth watching.

The AI race to zero is accelerating and thousands of startups have been steam-rolled before they could even reach the market and VCs.

Even if they survive this, by the time they have reached VCs for funding, they will finish them off by explaining that they won’t pay for their product when the best AI tools are there for free or close to free.