If you said five years ago, hey, Google's going to 6x its capex and the stock will go up, nobody in their right mind would have said that's even possible. Quadrillions, billions, hundreds of billions, trillions. It gets numbing after a while. There was a lot of conversation that Google was cooked. Google was not going to make it, that their revenue engine was being massively disrupted. And here they are, you know, sort of disrupting the disruptors. All of these numbers, I think, were inevitable. Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic. He was the co-founder of OpenAI. He left in 2017 to run full self-driving for Elon. And it'll start a new initiative focused on using Claude to accelerate Claude's own pre-training research. Cerebras record IPO closes up 68%, market cap $95 billion. Andrew Feldman, the CEO of Cerebras. It's like a lifetime achievement, like kind of like a Nobel Prize or an Olympic gold medal where you carry it for the rest of your life.
All right, I see Andrew Feldman has entered the room. Andrew, a pleasure to have you here.
Thank you for having me on your show. Appreciate it.
Now, that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.
Everybody, welcome to another episode of Moonshot. Today we have our extraordinary group of moonshot mates, DB2, our emperor of AI investing, Salem, professor of all things exponential organizations, and our very own artificial super intelligence, our moonshot mate, AWG. I'm Peter Diamandis, your host. Gentlemen, a pleasure to have you here.
And Peter, you're a birthday boy as well. Shall we sing happy birthday to you? Do you have...
Everybody's going to be signing off the pod right here, right?
That's right. We are not singers. Stick to the verbal.
My first career was in the New York City Opera Company.
You know, really, you just impressing all of us. Well, thank you, gentlemen, for your...
Do you want to hear? I would like to hear an aria sometime.
All right. Maybe I'll do an outro.
For sure. So, you know, we had such a fun surprise birthday party for you.
Oh my god. The other day, it was crazy. I have never been so surprised in my life. And honestly, you guys are the most giving individuals. So, Seem was visiting with Lily and his son Milan. We had a birthday dinner for him Saturday night, but his birthday was Sunday. And he walks me along the beach to a surprise birthday party where there are 50 people. I walk in this room and I've never been more surprised in my life. I mean, I literally dropped to my knees in a level of surprise.
But it was your birthday, Seem. And you were...
It was a perfect decoy. It was a great decoy. It was awesome.
Very special. Very special. And Dave, you sent a great message over. It was great. It was wonderful.
Thank you all for that. So, welcome to Moonshots. Our job here is get you pumped about the future. No politics, no doomersim, just the science and technology driving us along the singularity. Today we have a special episode, our annual recap of Google's mega event called Google IO. We'll be covering news with Andrej Karpathy joining Anthropic and Elon's defeat in the trial against OpenAI. And finally, we'll be joined by Andrew Feldman, the CEO of Cerebras after an epic IPO. So Dave, it was a blast to be with you at Google IO. Here's an image of us along with Tyler Donahue.
Yeah, it's great to be where it all started. You know, the vibe on AI is, you know, it's global, but within this epicenter where everything began, it's like it's off the charts. And you know, the first hour, just the amount of stuff to talk about in one hour compared to a year ago, compared to two years ago. I mean, we're taking it all for granted but it's just crazy, you know, just the number of new Google brands...
of new AI products is pretty baffling. So we'll go through it all. You know, we've got it all beautifully cut up today so you can analyze every piece of it.
And Alex, you were watching online, weren't you?
I was watching in real time dissecting it all for my newsletter, the Innermost Loop. I thought there were some high points, some low points, some midpoints, if I may say, and eager to dive in.
And some probably some no points. And of course, where's Waldo today, Seem? You know, you're a probability function on planet Earth. So, where are you today, Seem?
I just landed in Brazil. And I've got a bunch of meetings and presentations here. So I flew from LA with you, Peter, directly here.
Of course. Of course you are. Let it not be said that you're not the traveling dude.
Peter, I'm at the Cerebras headquarters today, too. The vibe here, you know, third biggest tech IPO in history. The vibe here is just, I couldn't resist the opportunity to feel it, you know, right after an IPO, a company. It's a once in a lifetime kind of thing for most people. So the vibe is just epic.
Yeah. A record IPO until the next record IPO until the next record IPO after that.
I know it's going to be 10x'd this year. So, you got to savor it while you have the record.
It's insane. All right, let's jump into all things Google IO. I want to kick it off with the opening summary by Sundar. Quite the year. Let's listen to Sundar and then we'll continue on and dive in.
Two years ago we were processing 9.7 trillion tokens a month across the surface, a huge number. Last year at IO that grew to about 480 trillion tokens and fast forward to today that number has jumped seven times to 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month. Over 8.5 million of you are now building new apps and experiences with our models monthly and our model APIs are now processing around 19 billion tokens per minute. We are of course also seeing incredible demand across our products. We now have 13 products with over a billion users each. Five of those have more than three billion users. AI overviews now has over 2.5 billion monthly users. And AI mode has been a revelation. Our biggest upgrade to search ever. People love it. In just a year, it's already surpassed 1 billion monthly users. Last year at IO, the Gemini app had 400 million monthly active users. Today we have surpassed 900 million, more than doubling in a year. And to date, more than 50 billion images have been generated with our Imagen models. In 2022, we were spending $31 billion annually in capex. This year, we expect that number to be about six times that, approximately 180 to 190 billion. Instead, we can now seamlessly distribute training across multiple sites, scaling across more than 1 million TPUs globally. This gives us the ability to create the largest training cluster in the world. Both chips are more energy efficient, delivering up to two times better performance per watt.
Wow. Quadrillions, billions, hundreds of billions, trillions. It gets numbing after a while.
It does, but you got to step back and like 6x-ing your capex. If you said five years ago, hey, Google's going to 6x its capex and the stock will go up. Nobody in their right mind would have said that's even possible. And there it is. I mean, those TPUs are, I mean, that's the lynchpin. And if you know they're 2x the power efficiency, but they're in the hunt now competing vertically from the transistor all the way through the user experience. And no one else can say that. So yeah, just a lot. Also, you know, you look at the array of logos that have over a billion users.
I mean, you have to go back, rewind the video, go back and look at that again. It's just a Google things now. Yeah, it's relentless.
The Gemini having 900 million users is pretty incredible because that's pretty close to ChatGPT.
I found that very striking.
Alex, what's your take on these numbers here?
Predictable. Couple thoughts. Easy. Well, inevitable in some sense. I'm reminded about 20 years ago, I had a conversation with Larry Page during his interregnum when he wasn't CEO. And I was reminded he was asking me for advice on how to get Google interested in spending $100 million to work on AI, if you can believe that. It's unconscionable by today's standards that Google wasn't interested 20 years ago in AI and now here they are. It's become the central focus of the company full stack from chips and data centers all the way through applications. But here we go. All of these numbers I think were inevitable. It's been widely remarked that if Google hadn't leaned in at every layer of the stack to trying to own or at least lead in AI, they would have been toast. The original model of Google based on search and ads would have been cooked. So what do you do? You lean into it. Gemini 900 million plus users. I think that's perhaps just slightly less remarkable than it might seem given that Gemini is basically being swapped for Assistant. Assistant already had quite a bit of traction, but nonetheless nice to see that Gemini usage is taking off. It's nice I think on balance to have something other than a duopoly between OpenAI and Anthropic which I think if Google doesn't aggressively lean into consumer and enterprise Gemini adoption I think that's the default outcome right now.
You know, and I do as well because again, I've known Larry since 2003, 2004. AI was always his focus. It was, he wanted to build an AI company from the very beginning.
And not difficulty for a while. I mean, it wasn't obvious to everyone else within Google for the first part of its life that AI was where this was all going.
And of course, Eric, the adult supervision in the room, came in and built the, you know, the revenue engine. And of course, Google's only able to do what it can do today because of the massive revenue. The other thing that people don't realize is that part of Larry's vision early on was also BCI. He wanted to connect the brain to AI.
And space stations. Peter, do you remember that whiteboard that Google used to maintain with their long-term tech tree and they were going to have a Google space station and BCIs and all of these things? That's all happening now. Finally, like three decades later, the Google whiteboard vision is finally playing out.
The whiteboard actually had the tethered satellite on it. They were going to make an elevator into space.
Space elevator. Yeah. And they needed a carbon nanotube wire for things to go up on. They manufactured about a meter of it.
A lot of money for a 20,000 mile cable.
We're finally catching up with the whiteboard.
I was with Jack Hidary at Sandbox AI yesterday talking about what the large quantitative models, the LQM are going to be able to do. And one of his objectives are new materials that have the tensile strength to give you a space elevator. So, you know, all of again, what do we say? What did you say, Alex? To speedrun every science fiction movie ever made in the decade.
Over the next 10 years. Like every sci-fi trope everywhere all at once over the next 10 years. That's the singularity.
Yeah. Just a big shout out and congrats to Sundar and Sergey and Josh and the team there. I mean hitting their numbers. Again, you have to remember that a year and a half ago, there was a lot of conversation that Google was cooked, Google was not going to make it, that their revenue engine was being massively disrupted. And here they are, you know, sort of disrupting the disruptors.
I mean, this is an AI native operating system company because they're now constantly continuous sensing, execution, adaptation, and they've kind of hitting an inner loop there.
This was the company that birthed the transformer. This was the company that my friend John Smith I think perhaps insufficiently famously pointed out that if you looked at the number of words or tokens in an average Google query over a period of 15 years and this is before everything hit its inflection point in 2017 or so with the transformer. But if you looked at the number of words per Google query it was following an exponential curve that was inevitably going to end up in people having full conversations with AI. So Google had the exponential trajectory of user interaction. They had the transformer. They had the compute. It was just a matter of putting all of the institutional pieces together. And it seems like they're finally coming together.
Yeah. Amazing. Moving us along after that epic intro by Sundar. The company, Google is launching an entirely new family of AI models called Gemini Omni. It's capable of generating video clips from prompts that include a variety of inputs including text, photos, videos, and audio. You know, Google says Omni will be the create anything from any input product. So, let's take a look at the video here being introduced by Demis. And Demis was a rockstar on stage. It was so much fun to see him there.
I'm excited to announce Gemini Omni. Models like Veo, Imagen, and Genie are able to create extremely realistic videos, images, and interactive simulations. It's a step change in simulating things like kinetic energy and gravity. Gemini's world knowledge and reasoning really shine in Omni. It can translate complex ideas into highly accurate videos. So, for example, you can give it a simple prompt like make an animation explainer of protein folding and get this. Proteins start as chains of amino acids. They fold into patterns like the alpha helix and flat sections called beta sheets, forming a perfect three-dimensional shape. Omni gives you a more natural way to edit video with conversational language. What's really cool is you can give it your own videos, for example, this selfie and change reality in a really fun way.
I hope people are watching this on YouTube because the video clips are extraordinary. Dave, you were going to say...
Yeah, the crowd reaction actually on Demis had by far the best visuals and the crowd reaction. First of all, the crowd is hugely into medicine and science as the use case that everybody cares about and Demis is the spokesperson for that. But then his visuals on the video stuff were the best, too. And you should go watch the original YouTube recording and see the full video of him morphing himself through different places and outfits and everything in real time. It's incredible. And I think, you know, in the worry about AI that's going on globally, we lose the fantasy and the cool factor that you could look forward to this your whole life and now you can suddenly play with it. And I really encourage everybody to just get in there and build some stuff and play with it. Put yourself in a movie as a character, change the backgrounds. Once you've experienced that, you really get a sense of the amazing things that are possible starting now and for the next few years. Just new things every week. It's...
Alex. Reality is cooked, isn't it?
I think reality is getting enhanced for sure, but I also want to applaud Demis and Google DeepMind for being the only arguably remaining American frontier lab to still be chasing multimodality open UK, right?
Well, they're really American. I mean, they may have a lot of personnel in UK, but it's an American frontier lab. They're the only frontier lab still chasing multimodality. So, OpenAI cuts Sora and arguably deemphasized video. Anthropic has never arguably been chasing multimodality. They've been squarely focused on codegen. That just leaves Google with the only credible frontier American video model since video is arguably the hardest modality combined with consumer demand. And then you have all of the Chinese frontier labs. China is taking video as a modality far more seriously. My sense from some of GDM's earliest announcements with multimodality is they have a grand vision of modality scaling. Even though video presents as the most consumer-friendly, the most impressive demo, actually at the back end, they're probably treating biological sequences like DNA or protein sequences as another modality. They probably have dozens of other modalities that they're trying to fold into this omnimodal model looking for modality scaling in a way that the other American frontier labs just aren't. So, it's a bet. It's at this point almost an idiosyncratic bet that they're going to get to some form of super intelligence that's distinguishable because it handles all these different modalities, text, audio, video, maybe biological sequence data, maybe other crazier modalities, all in some meta-uniform way that the other labs aren't achieving. But it's a bet nonetheless.
Interesting. See, I mean, I can't imagine a better kind of technology for education and teaching people. I mean I so wish this existed when I was doing organic chemistry and studying medicine.
I mean this should clear away so much of the craft of trying to figure out how to present things and how different ways of showing things, biological models etc. I mean this could all become real time and full 3D. I mean it's incredible to see what's going to come from this. Very exciting.
The real time part of it is huge, too, because in a call like this or a podcast like this, you can create real time graphics and visuals to fit the dialogue just purely with your voice. They can do it at Google. We can't do it because we don't have the token speed to keep up. So, we have to wait a minute. So, if you said something really cool right now, Seem, hey, Brazil, you know, let me tell you about data center explosions in Brazil. The graphic that backs that up would take a minute to come back. And so, you can't do it in real time, but they can. And it's just purely who has access to the compute.
Yeah, it's going to be coming where AI is going to be just creating a soundtrack and a visual track for your life, always present when you want.
Amazing. Let's dive into their new Gemini 3.5 Flash model. So, they just launched Gemini 3.5 Flash. It's the new default for Gemini app and AI search mode. And as you're going to hear, compared to 3.1 Pro, it's better across all the benchmarks. And importantly, Google says this new model is significantly faster in a league of its own. In terms of intelligence versus output speed, it's better handling agentic tasks, offering improved agentic coding, richer and more interactive graphics. Let's take a look.
And today I'm excited to introduce Gemini 3.5 Flash, our first in a series of models. When compared to 3.1 Pro, Flash is better across the board almost all benchmarks. It's made huge progress in coding and look at that extraordinary jump in GPQA, a benchmark that captures many real world economically valuable tasks. Second, 3.5 Flash is a very capable model at the frontier and comparable to the best models, but much, much faster. Which is why when you look at the intelligence versus output speed, it's in a whole league of its own in the top right quadrant. When looking at output tokens per second, it's four times faster than other frontier models and it's an incredible delight to use.
Alex, impressive. What do you think?
Well, remember when I opened saying there were highlights, low lights, and then to use the colloquialism mid. I would call Gemini 3.5 Flash solidly mid. If you look at its capabilities and others have pointed this out as well, just from a raw capability standpoint not talking about throughput or cost, it doesn't compare favorably with say GPT-5.5 High or Gemini Ultra or Pro. On the other hand this is a Flash series model so it's not Pro yet. Sundar sort of infamously at this point has said Gemini 3.5 Pro that's coming out in another month. There were groans in the audience at the time. So, this isn't intended to be top of range. I think the strategy, if I were to play Kremlin here, the strategy is I think Google is sort of solidly tier one and a half at this point in the race to raw frontier capabilities. 3.5 Flash represents perhaps pushing the optimal frontier in terms of throughput versus performance, that optimal frontier. But I think it's also very telling that Sundar is highlighting throughput versus performance instead of like number of tokens on the x-axis, input tokens versus performance or rather output tokens on the x-axis versus performance on the y-axis or some other metric. He picked the most flattering possible metric and if you actually...
Everyone picks flattering metrics, but some flattering metrics are also more sort of truthful than others in some global sense. And if you look at the metrics that Google's been highlighting, it's very telling 3.5 Flash is being compared primarily with 3.1 Pro less with frontier other models but secondly the areas, the benchmarks where it's really excelling are benchmarks where tool use in particular really aggressive tool use is needed. So, if I had to squint at this, I would say the emphasis in Google wasn't necessarily beating the frontier with 3.5 Flash, it was probably some combination of throughput maxing and tool use maxing, not pushing the boundaries of the frontier, but solid release nonetheless. It's nice that Google's still in the game.
And Dave, I'm imagining you, we've talked about, you know, the labs pulling their punches. I imagine that, you know, releasing, there'll be, you know, the next version of GPT will come out and then of course, you know, Pro will come out right after that.
Well the scuttlebutt here in Silicon Valley is that it's a two-horse race between OpenAI and Anthropic for the best AI in the world and the talent is flooding into those two buildings in SF and nothing in that demo or in the vibe on campus at Google contradicts that. So here you pointed out earlier that Google or Alex pointed out that Google is the one remaining horse in the race to the consumer and this is a very very fast model that gives the consumer a much better experience but the other labs have already pivoted to the enterprise and said look we're giving up on that we're going totally after these massive enterprise budgets and if you try and build something sophisticated with AI you want the smartest AI that solves the problem and you're not going to back off to a faster model that's not quite as intelligent. You just can't. And so they're going full bore after self-improvement at the other labs. The other difference from a year ago is, you know, Google's unstoppable war chest. You know, 180 billion in capex per year and rising, but the other guys in the interim raised, you know, OpenAI raised 120 billion in cash and they'll burn that pretty quickly. And Anthropic is on a similar trajectory now. So the war chests are actually not as different as they were a year ago. So, yeah, I think that's the only disappointing thing in the whole show is the best of the best Gemini is not up there with Mythos as far as we know. Now, I will say that Google doesn't, you know, they do soft sell. They don't announce what's coming in four months and promote and trumpet it because they don't need to. And so, if something really really big is cooking and coming soon, they didn't roll it out. But they don't need to roll it out. They'll wait until it's proven.
You know, I love the naming nomenclature here. Of course, we got GPT models, you know, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, and Gemini jumps from 3.1 to 3.5. It's fascinating. Seem, what do you make of this?
I thought one thing that's clear is you're seeing this kind of bifurcation now between premium cognition and ultra cheap but very fast cognition and I think that's going to continue. I think Alex makes a great point about throughput. This will allow a lot of throughput right and there's this continuous march for marginal intelligence cost trends towards zero.
Yeah. Here was the next segment that I pulled out and again I want to just a shout out to Jan Luca who clipped all these beautifully and provided them in record time for us for the show.
Yeah, a conversation about SynthID and content credentialing, you know, really important especially as we start to encroach on reality. How do you know if something is or is not AI generated? It's going to become more and more important than ever before. Let's take a look here at Sundar talking about SynthID.
Since launch, SynthID has now watermarked over 100 billion images and videos along with 60,000 years of audio assets. We are now going a step further and adding content credentials verification across products. This will show you if the origin of the content was AI or a camera and if it's been edited with generative AI tools. In this example, Gemini can tell this photo was captured with the Pixel camera and then edited with Google Photos. Of course, this only works at scale if more partners decide to watermark their own AI generated content. Nvidia signed on to SynthID last year. And today, I'm thrilled to announce that OpenAI, Kuaishou, and Luma Labs are adopting SynthID, too.
I love the fact that we're getting to standards and everybody's, you know, picking the best. Alex, how important is this?
You know, the irony is so many people were hand-wringing over the past few years that we won't know what's real and what isn't. And my response was always, we're going to get cryptographic, eventually cryptographic chains of custody from reality capture to what is ultimately presented to the user. In the same sense that when you use a browser, you can maybe see a little lock icon to indicate end-to-end SSL encryption. We're going to get the same thing for reality. And I view SynthID, which by the way was also just adopted by OpenAI. It was created by Google, now also adopted by OpenAI in the same breath. I think it's sort of ironic that we're going to get, it seems, end-to-end authentication of realness, proof of reality, if you will, not coming from the camera end, not coming from the reality capture end, coming from the synthetic end, coming from all the vendors that want to claim credit in some sense that they were the ones who generated the reality. And then the cameras, the camera makers and all of the recording device manufacturers, they're going to be downstream and the ones who adopt the same protocol. But either way, we're getting our end-to-end proof of reality one way or another.
I think there's a much broader story. I'd love Seem to get your thoughts on the bigger societal implications because a big topic at Stanford last night, you know, with Eric Schmidt and his entire team there. The rate that AI is innovating can't be kept up with by Congress and there's going to be no regulation of any value coming out of Washington. So the industry is starting to self-regulate and that's the only, you know, only AI can keep up with AI and so we may look back on this moment as one of the first moves by the self-regulation community where okay now we're going to start watermarking images. Hey everybody in the community, please adopt our standard for watermarking images. And then there'll be something else a week later, something else a week later, something else a week later. And that'll become the way that we govern ourselves in the future, much more so than any law coming out of Washington purely because the pace can't keep up. Seem, you think that's basically this is the first move in that direction.
I think that's exactly right. You know, when you have intelligence becoming abundant, then the scarcity goes towards trust and scarcity creates value. So we may end up at a point where authenticity is more valuable than creativity and that line between something being created and knowing how it was created etc is blurring is now merging because of the systems that are being created now and I think Dave the point you make is really really important once you have that trust layer right now you can scale. I go back to Jerry Michalski, my community member who said scarcity equals abundance minus trust right and so if you can solve for trust you solve for abundance. And one of the biggest challenges today, I thought this was really a big deal because we're moving from the information age to the verification age and trust is becoming infrastructure and I think that's a very powerful valuable pillar for the world going forward.
Playing arithmetic does that mean that abundance equals scarcity plus trust?
It does. It does. Scarcity plus trust gets you to abundance.
All right. Thank you for...
That's like grade five math. Even I can do that.
But you know because the cost of generating content is collapsing, right? Then the value shifts from signal filtering to authenticity. We saw this with photography where the big problem in photography is how do I take the best photograph because each dollar, each click cost you a dollar and you had a bunch of business models crop up around like selling expensive cameras or offering courses in photography and publishing books on composition. Then we moved to digital photography. The cost of creating a photograph went to zero. And now the big problem everybody has in photography is I have six copies of my photographs on seven different online services and you can't find anything. And the value then comes in that filtering system, right? And...
Salem, you know, we're moving into this intentional world that we design and everyone's like, 'What will happen next? What will happen next?' Well, it's whatever we design is what's going to happen next. But Dario and Demis are two probably dominant architects in the future of how we live. And it's just great to hear both guys go back and forth. But if you do a raw word count from Dario, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic and you go back, you know, the words were all about transformer architecture speeds intelligence benchmarks and then they transitioned to UBI ethics and now they're talking about the way the world should be governed going forward and writing papers on it. And so if you just track the word count it's also on this exponential change rate. Same with Demis. You know, Demis has to be a little more cautious because technically he's an employee of Google even though he acts very independently. But those are the two guys just very much determining the future of all humanity right now.
And so, you know, this is a, the watermarking is just like move one, act one of the whole future way we live.
And look at what's happening, right? Our trust in legacy institutions is collapsing and at the same time AI is building up the capability and the infrastructure and the foundation for delivering trust. So hopefully if that happens elegantly we'll have an elegant shift from scarcity to abundance rather than a messy one.
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The next product that they dove into and a central part of Google's plans is Antigravity. They released Antigravity 2.0, a standalone desktop app built to orchestrate multiple agents to execute tasks in parallel. Let's take a listen and then Alex, I'm coming to you for your evaluation. Mid-tier, high tier, no tier. Let's go on.
At the core is Antigravity 2.0, a new standalone desktop application that delivers fully on that original glimpse of a truly agent-optimized experience. The new Antigravity is unabashedly agent-first focusing on the core agent conversations, agent-produced artifacts and multi-agent orchestration. Like I said, unabashedly agent-first. As Sundar mentioned, this is the exact experience teams here at Google have been using to drive massive value. Let's take this live and actually show this operating system in action. Try running Doom right now. It just doesn't work. Turns out that the OS is currently missing some necessary video and keyboard drivers. So, let's just try and fix it in the new Antigravity. I have a prompt prepared. I'm going to paste it in. Antigravity ended up doing a whole host of research, ended up writing over 100 lines of code, and then finally built the operating system. Let's take a peek and see if it works. Amazing.
So, first off, Alex, what is Antigravity 2.0? Oh, and what are you thinking about it?
Yeah. So, let's remember where Antigravity came from. Do you remember Google's acquisition of Windsurf during that debacle? So, Antigravity is basically Windsurf rebranded from the Windsurf team that was acqui-hired by Google. And then Antigravity 1.0 versus 2.0. I view, you were asking earlier, Peter, is this high, mid, low? This is sort of mid in my mind. If you look at what Cursor has been doing by contrast, Cursor was much more aggressively leaning from their old interface which was sort of a reskinned Visual Studio Code-centric editor from their 1.0 oriented user interface to their more recent interface which is agent-first. I view this almost as a copycat fast follow or slow follow or somewhere in between from the Windsurf team within GDM. They're basically following the same metaphor of saying no, we're no longer about direct code editing access. Now the primary metaphor is orchestrating fleets of code agents that are doing all of the hard work. So I would say Google's almost hamstringing themselves a little bit by announcing this now as part of IO versus say in a more timely fast follow or even lead when Cursor was doing this months ago. I also, I've used Antigravity quite a bit. Certainly was using it even more when Google first announced it after the Windsurf acquisition and I would say not super impressive. It was very buggy. I think 2.0, I haven't had a chance to use 2.0 yet, but hopefully it's a good deal stronger, but really I don't know anyone who's doing their primary development work with Antigravity at this point. The development is happening either with Claude Code or with Codex or maybe with Cursor. Antigravity, don't know anyone who's using it.
You know, everybody's trying to accept every engineer at Google...
So Dave, you were trying to get...
Except even that's not true though. So, I mean it's been publicly reported that within Google DeepMind they're all desperate to get Claude Code access for everything.
Yeah, we talked about that a couple of pods ago. Dave, you were playing with this actually during Google IO yesterday.
Yeah, Tyler and I both installed it in real time as they were rolling it out, which maybe not the smartest move in the world because there's 16,000 people behind us in the crowd probably all trying to do the same thing. So, that was not a great first experience, but I don't blame Google for that. But this morning it worked fine. And completely agree with Alex's assessment. It looks almost identical to the new Cursor agent-first windows. I mean like I almost can't tell where I am. Am I on Cursor or am I in Antigravity? What they did do which is a little more extreme than Cursor is it completely replaces Antigravity 1.0. You can't even see the code anymore and you have to go and launch the old thing if you want to actually edit code. So, you know, Cursor didn't go quite that far, but it's really obvious where the puck is going. If you want to build things in the future, you're not even going to look at code. You're going to describe what you want and you're going to debug at this much higher level of evals and functional comparisons and you know, I don't like where that button is, move it. And so no, I think you know in the future nobody's going to want to go back to autocomplete code editor view. And so they leapt ahead and said we're just going to eliminate that entirely. And if you really want to hack, we'll give you a way to get back to it, but we're going where the puck is going and not where it was. But it really is exactly catch-up like Alex said.
Everybody's got the same, you know, it's Codex and it's Claude Code and Antigravity and they're just going to be leapfrogging each other. I'm just curious if there's going to be some new sort of breakout approach to this that's going to materialize. Alex, do you think there's anything in the future?
Well, code is clearly going away as a human endeavor. It's all being abstracted away by code agents that handle all code, and humans aren't maybe in the near-term future trustworthy enough to be even allowed to write their own code. So, I think that's one obvious arrow of time in this space. I think recursive self-improvement is another arrow of time. So not even old generation models are trustworthy enough. Maybe older models are trustworthy enough to rewrite themselves and generate newer better models, but code's going away. I think that's the obvious trend here.
Well, I think also Peter to answer your question on the next paradigm, we've only had this paradigm for a couple months. So, you know, let's let it settle in for a little. But no, clearly the next paradigm is exactly the Star Trek holodeck, which Alex has been saying for a while. So, right now, you're talking to it. It's building things for you. It's incredible, but it's not natively graphical and visual and you know, you're not moving things with your hand. So, if you say, 'I want to move that button. I want to change this. I want to connect this to my email.' You're not actually seeing the button move in real time. It's regenerating. And then you see a new rendering and in the future it'll be a real-time graphical experience that's interacting in your comfortable physical space kind of native human environment and that's, you know, that next iteration is certainly within this calendar year.
All right. Next up is Gemini Spark in Google's, it's Google's, you know, take on OpenClaw I think is the most obvious thing to say. It's a new always-on AI agent that can write emails, create study guides, keep an eye out for, you know, financial fees that you're being charged. It's Google's 'we have OpenClaw at home' moment. It's powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash. And it offers you a 24/7 operation. Let's take a listen to the conversation about Gemini Spark.
Introducing Gemini Spark. Taking action on your behalf and under your direction. It runs on dedicated virtual machines on Google Cloud and it's 24/7. A task right off the bat. This is a pretty straightforward example, but it's so useful. Help me draft an email to the team, compile everything about our recent Gemini Live launches and wins from the last week. And what's amazing here is Spark will go through step by step. Look at all these steps, all the time it saves you going through and again work across the various skills and apps that you have. And what's really amazing is it'll break it down and also be able to generate files for you. So the first one here, this is a live RSVP tracker right in Google Sheets. You can see that it shows who's confirmed and who hasn't. What's amazing about this is it'll actually update because it's connected to Gmail. So when L. Thompson row eight RSVPs it'll update which is pretty amazing.
I mean one of the things I find fascinating is it's the integration across all of the Google products is very powerful right there's a point at which...
There's such a cost for not being inside the Google ecosystem that everybody defaults to it. Isn't that this is the most ironic thing I've ever heard because, you know, people who are younger don't remember that Google only exists because the FTC stopped Microsoft from killing it. So, Microsoft had just killed Netscape, taken total control of the browser and integrated it with the operating system and made it impossible to do anything on the internet unless you went through Microsoft. And that, you know, that triggered the FTC, Mike Herschland, came in the whole lawsuit, stopped Microsoft cold in its tracks, and they paid a $1 fine. I don't know if anyone remembers that hilarious outcome, but they had to unbundle, and that opened the door for Google to come into existence. Microsoft pseudo competed with Bing, but they were prevented from competing aggressively and tying it back to the operating system. So here we are all these years later and Google is coming out with this series of kind of exact copy of Cursor, exact copy of OpenClaw, exact copy of, but it's perfectly integrated with these other, you saw on the other slide what a dozen Google products that have over a billion users. A billion users out of this world population is a massive installed base. So if you want OpenClaw, yeah, you can be over there but if you want OpenClaw equivalent that works natively with Google Docs, Gmail, everything else, you know, Android, everything else, your Google Pixel camera, then you have to use this. And so it's exactly history replaying itself. It's so ironic because they were so anti-Microsoft back then, the whole 'don't be evil' motto was a direct attack on Microsoft implying they were the big guys that were evil. So here we are, you know, years later, I'm not saying Google's evil in any way, I'm saying they're tying as their competitive advantage in the exact same way that Microsoft used to.
Yeah. Alex, what do you think about this compared to OpenClaw?
I think it's a lazy copycat product. I think it's obviously Google trying to take advantage of the resources that they have. So note, it's hosted in a GCP VM, not necessarily pushed all the way to the edge, although they have aspirations to Gemini and Android Halo for that. But if you're Google and you see OpenClaw and you see Jensen out there saying OpenClaw is the next big ChatGPT, really what's the smallest, what's the minimum viable response that you could take? It's okay we're going to host GCP VMs with Gemini Flash that integrate together all of our products that run headlessly. That's the sort of minimum viable strategic response. What I would have liked to see from Google DeepMind here was the maximum response. Show us the art of the possible. Show us what a next generation OpenClaw or Hermes competitor actually looks like. Create the benchmarks. Show us next generation capabilities. And they didn't deliver that here.
Well, but Alex, I mean, just to be fair, they're delivering on a lot. It's not just one piece, right? It's a lot that is being deployed on Google IO day. But having said that, you know, I still love Skippy, which is an OpenClaw on top of my Mac Studios. I love it because it's got a personality versus being sort of a generic agent that's ever-present. I don't know if you can do that with Gemini Spark, but I think the personality side of these are critically important. Seem, any thoughts for you?
Two thoughts. One is I agree with Alex. I really could have gone for a little bit more bite here. But on the other hand, when you can make agents generally available to the average Google user, there'll be hundreds of millions more people training up agents and I think that's generally just good. OpenClaw has lots of room to be experimental, power user oriented, very opinionated, doing the weird things like the Nat camera stuff. But I think this is a very solid entry into that world to give people a taste of what an agent world could look like. But it is boring.
It's safe. It's playing it safe. Like, is it a safe entry? Yes, it's a safe entry. Will a lot of people maybe use this to clean up their Gmail inbox? Yeah, probably. But it's not pushing the frontier, which is really what I would have loved to have seen here.
Yeah, I think that's your recurring theme on a lot of these, Alex. Is that true?
I think, I mean, look, as an accelerationist, yes, I'd love to see frontier labs pushing the frontier. And to the extent that this is an avatar of Google DeepMind and not just Google corporate, I would love to see more frontier coming out of the frontier.
Dave, you want to close this out?
Two quick thoughts. Sorry. Yeah, two quick thoughts. Like there's something very powerful happening here because this is giving everybody an operating system for their lives because of the deep integration with all the other Google stuff. So I think the next productivity jump is going to come from persistence and this will create a massive enabler across the board and it's going to go back to the earlier comment. I just want to double down on that which is going to train a lot of people on how to build agents and run agents and I think that's going to then enable another class of things to come forward from that.
Yeah. So there's no doubt that this is all fast follower exactly the way you're characterizing it.
On the other hand, you know, Peter, you love your Skippy. I love my agents that I set up too. But when you talk to somebody on the street and you say, 'Hey, have you set up an OpenClaw or a Hermes?' overwhelmingly across the world people say no I haven't done that and that install and onboarding experience is just too much friction so I wouldn't underestimate the power of default behavior now over half the world uses Google and if Google says...
Okay, Gemini Spark is going to be one click away from a Google search. It's completely integrated. A massive fraction of the world is just going to click the button, and then their first experience with a personalized agent will be via that click. And so I don't think that anything can slow down Google because of their massive distribution advantage. And so they don't have to push the outer boundary. They can afford to be faster. And I am equally disappointed, Alex. I'm not saying it, but from a strategy point of view, they don't need those risks. They just need to be as good one day later and integrated with Chrome, integrated with Google search, integrated with Android, and they will win.
I think Google's magic potion is making it user-friendly, making it easy, making it intuitive. And I think they're going to deliver with Gemini Spark on that particular promise. All right. Here's another part of Google's resurrection and dominance. It's agentic powering of AI search mode. AI everywhere. And remember the conversation we had, search is dead. Well, search is not dead. It's just been reinvented. Let's take a listen.
I'm excited to announce we're launching a brand new intelligent search box. Before the search box was a contained space, but now it's totally reimagined with AI. It expands with your curiosity. And as you ask, search helps you formulate your questions with AI-powered suggestions. This goes beyond autocomplete. It offers nuances that you might not have even thought to add. Now, we're taking an exciting step toward this vision where you'll be able to create and manage multiple AI agents for your many tasks right in search. Now, let's say you're apartment hunting. You can do a total brain dump of what you're looking for with all your criteria like location and natural light and availability, and your agent will continuously scan the entire web across sites, social, and forums.
Persistent search here, right? So, this is your agent. You know, whenever you've asked a question, it is going to persistently be looking for the latest and greatest. Yes, this new apartment just became available. This product just got cheaper. You know, your wife loves this topic and here's a new product delivered to her. The other side though is that autocomplete function. I wonder where it's going to take us. Right? You're going in asking or thinking about asking one question and then of course Google can sort of drift you into asking a different question you didn't intend to actually ask. A lot of interesting perturbations here.
Oh my god. Yeah. Well, think about a vacation plan where you're like, you know, I really think I should go to Barbados and it autocompletes to Bermuda and you're rerouted to a different hotel. The revenue power of that is astounding. Really, you know, OpenAI rolled out their first ads and a lot of companies I know have adopted it, but it's very ham-fisted. You know, it's like here's some ads on the side. They're obviously ads, but the Google version of it has to preserve $200 billion of existing 90% margin revenue. So, they haven't quite figured out how they're going to surf that, but their power of the user decision-making is like nothing we've ever seen before. So, Google AdWords is now going to gently sort of drift you towards a different question that you weren't there asking.
It's been, I mean, remember Google Instant as well which also offered relatively fast suggestions. I don't think Google ended up directly monetizing that but Google does to Dave's point have a long history of steering users toward more profitable queries. So I think that's probably quite likely. What I probably underline here is the shape of the rectangle changed after decades. How big a deal is that? After so many armchair commentators saying that Google was about to be disrupted by ChatGPT with web search. Turns out Google is able to self-disrupt and able to change the shape of that multi-decade old rectangle. And it changed the shape in the direction of building AI modalities, AI search natively into their search experience, which I think many people were scared wasn't going to happen. They did it in the end.
You know, guys, my very first venture investment ever was TripAdvisor back when it was first starting. And the big quandary at TripAdvisor was how are we going to have completely unbiased, accurate reviews and still get paid by the hotels? We need to make money somehow. How's this going to work? And it turned out that just by sorting the list, you know, the human default behavior is so dominant that they'll go over.
Laziness. You mean laziness is so dominant?
Yeah. You know, but laziness, but we're buried in decisions now. So many things coming at us from so many different directions that we have to be lazy. Like only Alex could actually study every single pathway and make an optimal choice. Everyone else, you just have to fall into the default buckets once in a while. And so, you know, 80% of people will click on one of the first two or three hotels. So, you can have perfectly accurate reviews and just resort the list so the ones that are paying you are at the top and then you have your cake and eat it too. So, I think that default behavior will hugely benefit Google because they will steer the users, but they don't have to be super overt and you know, they're not going to misguide you into some fraudulent product. They're allergic to that like crazy. But people will still follow the default suggestions from Gemini and then Google will collect the revenue from whoever is willing to pay.
I just love the fact that they have the courage to risk disrupting their own business. I think that's such a hard thing organizationally to do and I got to give them full props for going after it.
Yeah. And for everybody, you know, everybody listening to this, you know, our goal here is to give you an overview of what Google has just done. It's so dominant on the planet. It does steer a lot of humanity's sort of abilities. So I hope folks are enjoying this summary. Please dive into these. You know, your mindset of curiosity is your single greatest tool. So go and play with these things. You know, when you finish listening to this podcast, go and jump onto Google and play with the new AI search or its capabilities.
One more note, Peter, if I may, just on Google self-disruption via search. I think there's this misconception out there that the main obstacle to Google self-disrupting their search with so-called modern AI was somehow on the business side or the business risk or the advertising side. I think actually the main obstacle was more technical. That Google engineers for a couple of years there were concerned that there wasn't a cost-effective way or a time-effective way to squeeze generative models into the very narrow and latency-sensitive and cost-sensitive parameters of just powering a search. That the models were too expensive and too slow to yield search results that would be competitive. And this is I suspect one of the reasons why you see going back to Gemini 3.5 Flash emphasizing throughput so much. It's reflecting Google's own internal dogfooding needs of having ultra-high throughput models that they could use to power search and some of their own internal applications that maybe OpenAI and Anthropic aren't feeling that demand function as much.
Makes sense. Makes sense. All right. Next subject is Google is launching a universal cart that users can add products to from YouTube, from search, from Gemini, from Gmail. Google says this intelligent shopping cart works across a multitude of different merchants from Nike and Target to Walmart to Shopify. So you could literally add a product when you're searching on a Nike site or a Target site and then have it monitored and bought at the same time. Let's take a look. You know, again, this is part of Google's incredible revenue engine. Okay.
I am excited to announce the universal cart, a truly intelligent shopping cart. It works across merchants and across services. You'll be able to add things to your cart when you're browsing search, chatting with Gemini, watching YouTube, or even reading your Gmail. The moment you add a product, your cart goes to work for you in the background. It finds deals, looks at price drops, gives you insights on the price history, and alerts you when something comes back in stock.
So, reinventing the shopping experience. I've got some comments, but I'd like to hear from you guys first.
The elephant in the room.
Yes. The elephant is Amazon. So I look at every announcement relating to shopping from Google through the lens of how are they going to compete with Amazon for retail shopping. And whether it's trying to commodify, create sort of virtual storefronts for individual retail vendors, whether it's crawling third-party e-commerce websites and assembling virtual pages, and now universal carts, this is all through the lens of how they're going to compete with Amazon. So I think the elephant in the room here is is Amazon even going to contemplate going anywhere near complying or adopting Google standards? My guess is not.
Well, you know, the follow-on here, we're going to be seeing in a few moments the reinvention of Google Glass, where you've got imaging capability and we're going to see probably the next invention of shopping where shopping is always on. Wherever you're looking and you see something and your AI agent realizes, oh, I'm focusing on Alex's beautiful orchid in the background, which is, I mean, that orchid real, Alex? I just need to ask.
I thought Peter, you said reality was cooked, so you tell me.
Okay. Literally, when I look at something, my AI agent will say, 'Oh, you're focusing on that. Do you want to purchase it?' Or as you're walking through the day, right? Instead of shopping becoming sort of something you do for an instant of time, it's a continuous function. And universal cart is aggregating all the things and then probably at the end of the day saying, hey, do you want to purchase that? Just say yes. We're going to be seeing, this is an early step but not the full instantiation of reinventing shopping.
Yeah, so today we go from human to website to shopping cart to checkout, right? And tomorrow we're going to go from intent to agent to transaction.
And I think every CMO in the world going forward is going to be asking how do I convince 100 million agents to choose my product.
They're going to have to market to the agents, right? And so, and I think this is powerful. I mean, look, Google helped create a trillion-dollar company by helping people do search. Somebody's going to create a trillion-dollar company by helping agents buy.
But are you ever going to market from an agent? I mean, my agent knows what I want, knows my genetics, knows my taste from everything else. It may just be buying stuff for me all the time that could be returnable. Sort of surprise and delight. Something shows up on the front doorstep. Oh, I thought you'd like this. Here it is. If you don't want, I'll have it picked up and returned.
We'll definitely go to that. The disruption to e-commerce is not the better shopping. It's getting rid of shopping.
There's this ambient experience where, hey, your shoes look a bit dirty from the camera. I looked from your doorway camera. I'm shipping you new shoes. You know, it'll be that kind of thing.
I think it's just amazingly shocking the degree to which the big guys don't care anymore about consumer shopping because Amazon was nothing but consumer shopping originally and built their entire empire on consumer shopping and then added AWS. AWS is so much bigger at Amazon now than the entire Amazon we know, all of the shopping. And so Google was already competing with that side of Amazon with GCP versus AWS. And so they're already in this battle royale over compute and data centers and enterprise use and everything. And so Google had already tried to compete in retail with Froogle. Remember Froogle?
Yeah. So I think that this is another attempt to take Amazon head-on on the shopping side but I think AI is a big game-changer. And so but you know it doesn't matter too much whether Amazon defends its turf or whether Google encroaches and wins. At the end of the day the battle on the cloud and the back end is so much bigger and it's already raging. So this is kind of cool. I think it's just the next stage of this trillion-dollar retail battle that will rage on for a while.
All right, let's jump into conversation about Gemini app and NotebookLM. Here's Josh Woodward who heads Gemini. I think we're going to get Josh on the pod here. We'll talk to him about what he's up to. Let's take a listen.
More than 900 million users are coming to the Gemini app every month. Just on its own, NotebookLM has now been used to create more than 1.5 billion notebooks, podcasts, slide decks, and more. That's now available in more than 230 countries in over 70 languages. It now opens up immediately and soon you'll be able to pick a regional dialect that resonates with you.
You've got a right good mix of different accents knocking about like this one from Liverpool. Gemini Omni is coming right into the Gemini app. Let's look how this plays out in the real world. I want you to meet Sashu. She is working on a new song and she wants to create a quick video teaser. So, she shares the raw video. She adds some reference visuals to it. Let's take a look at what it looks like.
The third update today is about how agents are coming to Gemini. One of our newest out-of-the-box agents called the daily brief. It's a personalized digest that's designed to be your first stop every morning. Here's how it works. You can see here that it's synthesizing information from across my inbox. And with this travel info, I can just take the next step right in line. So, this is an integration story. This is Google integrating across all of its capabilities and making it so magical that you can't afford not to be in the Google ecosystem. Dave, what do you think about this?
You know, it's amazing when, you know, you got one guy on stage demonstrating here, we can build an entire operating system in real time. Let's go. I'm consuming a trillion trillion tokens right now building and nobody gets it, right? Nobody can relate to building an operating system. Then Josh gets up there and says, 'Here's a real human musician and here's her trying to portray herself to her fan base.' The crowd goes crazy. And it just shows you the human aspect of this is so dominant even in Google, even within the empire. The human aspect of it is so dominant in people's minds. And you know, it doesn't come through on the video cast when 20,000 people see Josh present something and they go, 'Wow, oh my god, I can totally...' and the vibe is contagious across the whole crowd and it just is hard to capture that in a video clip, but it's just remarkable. It's going to unleash so much creativity and it's such an exciting time and I wish, you know, I wish that was the only vibe, you know, that everyone could just capture and hold and bottle that in. But this was just a great moment. Alex, your take.
Why is Google still branding NotebookLM as NotebookLM? It should have been folded directly into Gemini or maybe a Workspace or something else. Why does this still have an independent brand? I don't understand it.
Well, look at all the other, it's like Spark and Flash and Anti-gravity and like all this is really fragmented all over the map like divisional kind of branding.
Google has this reputation for better or for worse of launching lots of products and having a culture where product managers get promotions for launching but not maintaining products. I'd really love under the spirit of more wood behind fewer arrows to see all of this functionality just unified in a way that gets sustained.
Yeah. Especially because AI is such a unifying force. If you can put one voice and interface on top of all this mess.
And like so, and Google's branding originally was so good.
You know, all the other search.
It was so speaking directly and colorful and humanistic and friendly and all of that. Speaking directly to Josh and the Google team, please just unify all of these offerings and maintain them. Don't keep launching 10 different products and product names that we'll forget about a few months from now. Just please unify all of them and maintain them.
You know, the idea of a daily brief, I love it. You know, Skippy gives me a daily brief. This is a beautiful integration here. But being able to know what you're doing, when you're doing it, what your intention is, and giving you updates all the time on your flight. You know, there's a new flight that's available now. It's five times cheaper or whatever the case might be. And the weather is going to be hotter than expected. So, make sure to pack different. That level of overlay intelligence is going to be magical, right? It's what.
It is. But at the same time, remember Google Reader, Google's RSS reader that Google abandoned despite having a rabid user base, myself included. I know Google really wants to own the news feed. That much is obvious, but please just maintain it.
So, two thoughts. One is I've always thought about NotebookLM to per Alex's earlier comments as this weird thing sitting out there because it incorporates presentation and learning and interaction that kind of does, you know, what's the difference between doing this and the Gemini app and doing it in Spark. I mean, people are going to create a lot of confusion around this. The point that Alex made I just want to double down on which is when in any big company, we had this at Yahoo as well, you're rewarded for getting something out there but then you've got a strategic project manager looking across resource allocation about 10 different projects and so you get a peanut butter problem where you're very thin across all the different projects, you don't iterate very well. One of the few companies that iterates very well is Apple. They will relentlessly iterate on their products and most other companies on a small number of products. Yeah.
Yeah. And they go very, there's a whole thing written by Brad Garlinghouse called the Peanut Butter Manifesto when I was at Yahoo that mirrors this whole challenge of how do you navigate this in a limited thing because they're not run as each individual team doing startups with KPIs of their own and targets etc. They're run across in hierarchical structures in many cases and you suffer a lot from that. All right, Google's new product called audio glasses. We heard earlier about their partnership with XREAL. Here's a partnership with Samsung and a couple of different glass manufacturers. Let's take a look and how is this going to impact our lives? Two videos to show, then we'll discuss them.
The next big milestone for Android XR is intelligent eyewear. Today, I'm excited to announce that our first audio glasses will arrive this fall. They are designed to give you all-day help with Gemini that is spoken into your ear privately rather than shown on a display. And these glasses let you stay hands-free and heads-up for things like listening to music, taking photos, making calls, or tapping into your phone apps, all without reaching for your pocket. All right, video number two from Samsung.
At Samsung, our vision is to enrich people's lives and help shape how we live tomorrow. In close partnership with Google, we're introducing intelligent eyewear that empowers you to connect to the world with confidence. Built with Samsung's precise engineering and craftsmanship, we're merging form, function, and helpful intelligence to create something you'll want to wear. In eyewear, every millimeter counts. Today, we're thrilled to share a first look at the upcoming styles co-created with our eyewear partners, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster.
All right, the elephant in the room here. It's got forward-looking cameras, but you're not seeing words or images on the screen. You're being spoken to by your AI. Interestingly enough, I think that being present in life has just been cooked as well. I mean, imagine you're walking around and you're just having, you're not talking to your wife, your girlfriend, your kids. You're just having the agent whispering to you all the time. Sel, what do you make of this?
So, a bunch of things. I was really disappointed that there's no visual on the screen. I mean doing the audio is, it might be in Alex's words, very mid. But we're moving to that point where human-computer interaction becomes continuous and becomes an ambient layer that's just ongoing and I think that is the bigger story here because that will kind of just continue to play out as we merge with technology. Already we pick up our phones 80,000 times a day. This just continues that in a very kind of unnoticeable way. The form factor is very workable.
Google should have owned smart glasses. Instead, Meta is running away with this space. Apple is also playing catch-up. Where was Google? Google had, I was one of the earliest users of Google Glass. Remember that? And.
I did not fortunately, but they had a battery life of like five minutes and they self-bricked through operating system updates. It was, I think even Google would recognize it was prematurely released. Google could have kept iterating to this earlier point about doubling down. Google could have kept iterating on smart glasses from the Google Glass era and they didn't. They basically abandoned Google Glass to enterprise and then abandoned them completely. And now this represents a complete reset except without all of the conveniences that Google Glass had. Meanwhile, Meta was iterating away, spending billions of dollars, sure, but iterating away at smart glasses. And now Meta has the lead in the space, not Apple and not Google. So, I would love to see a very competitive smart glass market between Meta, Google, and Apple, but I really would like to see Google XR in particular, Android XR, stepping it up a notch and shipping much more quickly. Right now, Meta is running away with the space.
Well, I mean this is where society is going to have a huge rift because you know the punching in the face was a very real thing last time Google went down this path and they are trying to own the consumer and be a consumer-friendly brand. But if they roll out a product where half of society is walking around recording everything all day long and the other half is offended by that then that's going to be a major major problem and they're stuck. You know they want to own the space. They have the technology to do it. People are going to want to talk to their Skippy, their agent all day long. They're not going to want to lose touch with it. So, this is a great way to stay in touch with your kind of agentic world that's working for you behind the scenes. So, I'm very eager to use it. I'm also not super eager to get punched in the face. You know, there were three commencement addresses this week, including Eric Schmidt's in Arizona, where as soon as the commencement speaker said AI, the whole crowd went boo. And so I mean if you're not aware that that's what's going on and it's very easy to live in your echo chamber especially here in Silicon Valley or in Cambridge but you got to walk around Mississippi or walk around Nebraska to really understand how big a deal this is going to be. So I think the glasses are going to be a huge forcing function in this inevitable point.
Audio glasses. Hello, oxymoron.
Well, audio-visual oxymoron. No, they go together very well.
But the audio feedback layer, I think it was a, you know, they want to provide a product that actually works consistently. And I think probably the imaging up on AR glasses is still kind of weak. You know, the version of the Meta glasses I've tried is okay, but it's still a far way off from being able to turn on an ambient AR layer that's convincing and compelling. The brightness isn't there. You got to look at it in the right, you know, but audio having your AI being able to say, 'Oh, okay. I know you were shopping for that. Do you like that one and I'll order it for you right now?' Or importantly, I don't need to, you know, when I see Alex approaching me and I've forgotten his name, and he's coming at me and the glasses can say, 'Oh, you know, that's Alex Weezner Gross, you know, he's got an IQ of 100,000.' You know, that should be enough.
I'll never forget your name, Peter, for the record.
