Google I/O Starts Today

Meta prepares 10% RIF, Google and Blackstone form new cloud co., Karpathy joins Anthropic

Brandon Gorrell

May 19, 2026

Happy Tuesday.

We’re live on YouTube and 𝕏.

The current thing in tech and business is Andrej Karpathy joining Anthropic.

Today’s lineup

Send Cut Send Founder & CEO James Belosic at 11:45 AM
Nourish Co-Founder & CEO Aidan Dewar at 12:00 PM
Status Co-Founder & CEO Fai Nur at 12:10 PM
Commune Co-Founder & CEO Tanay Tandon at 12:20 PM
METR Member of Technical Staff Ajeya Cotra at 12:30 PM
Tatari Co-Founder & CEO Philip Inghelbrecht at 12:45 PM

Run of Show

Google I/O Starts Today

Google (well, technically Alphabet) is up 140% over the past year. Sitting at $4.68 trillion with just shy of $110B in revenue last quarter is a great setup for the next era of the AI story. GCP is growing faster than AWS and Azure, and Wall Street has fully repriced the company as a full-stack AI winner. Long gone are concerns about Google Search weakness (the business continues to grow: queries at an all-time high, Search & Other revenue up 19% YoY).

Google I/O offers consumers launches or previews of tons of new products and features. The Verge warns that there might be some AI fatigue at this point, even from users who aren’t actively booing former Google CEOs at university commencement speeches. The goal is “ambient and useful” instead of pushy and desperate. Many Google experiences now have duplicative Gemini panels. For example, right now I’m seeing one Gemini star in my Google Doc and another in the Chrome browser I’m using to load Google Docs. In a truly hilarious outcome, if I open both of the Gemini chat panels simultaneously, my Google doc disappears entirely, crowded out by the dueling AI assistants. Nevertheless, the new Gemini video model looks incredible and there will be tons of delightful experiments that may turn into blockbuster products, or get shelved by year-end. That’s the beauty of Google’s culture though, plenty of opportunity for experimentation.

For investors, the focus will be distributed across three key areas. First, the next Gemini model. There hasn’t been much vague posting about it, which according to Andrew Curran could mean one of two things:

I’m personally not sure that Google I/O is the correct forum for discussion of Mythos level breakthroughs or surprisingly new emergent capabilities, but given the talent and resources of the DeepMind team, there’s a lot of broad optimism about the next iteration of Gemini.

Agentic commerce will also be top-of-mind for investors, since messaging around the Gemini app has strayed away from advertising as an immediate monetization engine. Google has a lot of capabilities when it comes to closing the consumer shopping loop, even though e-commerce customer behavior seems to be lagging expectations here. Personally, I’ve done a lot of research about products through LLMs but routinely hesitate to have AI fully process the checkout (Apple Pay is pretty seamless these days, Shopify saves all my annoying info, and I still like to reality check carts before clicking “pay”).

The last focus area for investors is the TPU. Google I/O isn’t necessarily the place to dig into custom silicon margin structures and backlog accounting nuances, but investors will be hanging on to anything that contextualizes the shape of Google’s TPU plans over the next few years.

Yesterday on the show, we had a lovely conversation with Joanna Stern of TheNewThings.com and author of I Am Not a Robot. Lots of fun takes about the AI tools we all interact with through digital services, but what stuck out to me was her expectations that AI wearables will become much more popular in the next few years. People talk about a capability overhang in enterprise AI deployments, but the capability overhang in consumer products is arguably much much longer. Apple iterates extremely methodically, manufacturing new devices at scale takes years to ramp up, and hardware decisions that get made around a certain AI workflow can potentially be obsolete in months as the underlying technology changes. Google has taken some fun swings at emerging hardware platforms in the past (Google Glass, Cardboard, Fitbit, etc) and I’m very excited about the possibility of a new swing from Google here being the wildcard headline from this year’s I/O.

Clip Spotlight: AI Journalist Joanna Stern on growing resentment toward AI among college students

“Students have started to talk to their peers, who graduated a year before, and they’re like, ‘Oh shit, they don’t have jobs.’”

Joanna Stern says that college students’ opinions about AI have only gotten more negative over the last year.

“If you talk to any young person either in or out of college, they are thinking about that. It is a very real thing.”

From yesterday’s show.