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(Camille Cohen/Getty Images)

GEMINIVE HAD ENOUGH

Google I/O: Gemini everywhere, AI search, glasses, “Google AI Ultra” for $249 a month

Google is embracing AI-powered search, squeezing its leading Gemini AI model into pretty much every product it makes, and putting it on your face.

Jon Keegan

5/20/25 4:42PM

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai just wrapped up the two-hour keynote speech at Google’s annual developer conference, “Google I/O,” in the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California.

Maybe the company should just call itself Gemini, based on how often the many variations of the brand were mentioned. By Google’s own count, it was 95 times.

Gemini, the catchall brand for all of Google’s AI products, obviously sits in the center of the company’s roadmap. But that roadmap leads in many different directions, along some weird paths that many regular people might not travel on. But hey, these announcements are aimed at the developers who can think of cool apps we might actually use.

Gemini Pro, App, Flash, Live

🤖 The flagship AI product in the Gemini family is Gemini 2.5 Pro. It currently sits atop the popular Chatbot Arena leaderboards, beating out OpenAI’s o3 and ChatGPT 4o models, as well as xAI’s Grok3. Pichai boasted that Gemini recently completed the “Pokemon Blue” video game and that the chatbot had processed 480 trillion tokens in a month, a 50x increase over last year.

Google clearly thinks you should be using Gemini for everything in your life, and it’s going to jam it into pretty much every Google product you use.

The new feature that most people are actually going to see all the time is the new AI-powered Google Search.

🔎 Search is getting an “AI mode” button, which lets you type in extra long detailed queries for complicated searches. Behind the scenes, “a multitude” of “fan-out” queries go collect all the information you need from different sources, and it’s packaged together for you with maps, highlights, and photos.

Gemini 2.5 is jammed into that too, it seems. It will also be in Chrome. It’s just going to be everywhere.

👁️ There’s also the Gemini app. That will let you do something called “Gemini Live,” which used to be called “Project Astra” (they also mentioned something called “Search Live”), which turns on your camera and lets you ask Gemini questions about what’s in front of you. This was genuinely helpful in a demo they showed for the technology helping a musician with a vision disability see everything around him. But the other demo just showed off how it would be able to tell you that your shadow is not a person, and that a garbage truck is not a convertible.
🌅 The Gemini app also has access to Google’s Imagen 4 model for improved image generation (and better text) and Veo 3 for video generation with sound effects in case you need a short clip of an old fisherman reading a few lines of dialogue with splashes in the background. Who doesn’t?!
🎥 After making lots of weird, short AI videos, you can now edit them together in Google Flow, an AI-powered video editor.
📝 It will generate... quizzes? By sifting through all of your personal data, the model can infer your interests and tailor educational quizzes to your hobbies.
💵 And if you absolutely need to have every last one of these AI features, you can now pay either $19.99 per month for Google AI Pro or $249 per month(!) for Google AI Ultra.

Agent mode

🕵 Yes, “agentic AI” is the buzzword of the moment, and Google is no exception. What used to be known as “Project Mariner” has now been dubbed Agent Mode. This new feature does have great potential, as it can go out on the web, fill out forms for you, and take care of the most annoying work of being online. This agentic behavior will be available for developers to tap into, and like Microsoft, it will work with Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol.

Android XR glasses

👓 The other big thing announced for developers is Android XR, which is a framework for all things VR, AR, and everything in between. This is meant to be used for bringing Gemini to a wide range of face computers.

They showed a slightly glitchy live demo of new Android XR glasses that seemed to do a lot of what Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses do, like showing you notifications, performing translations, and answering questions about the things in front of you.

Google is partnering with Samsung and eyeglass retailers like Warby Parker and Gentle Monster to develop a range of Android XR-powered glasses.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals

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TAKING ACCOUNTS

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Britain announces social media ban for under-16s starting early 2027

The UK government plans to use the same model for the restrictions as Australia — but how successful has that case study been so far?

UK Prime Minister Announces Under-16s Social Media Ban

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

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Tesla used skewed data in push for European FSD approval, Reuters finds

Tesla has used highly questionable safety stats in an effort to win over European regulators and rekindle sales in the region, according to a Reuters investigation.

Tesla reportedly pitched regulators in Sweden and the Netherlands with claims that its Full Self-Driving (FSD) tech is over 7x safer than human drivers. However, independent researchers told Reuters that the stats are misleading because Tesla compares airbag-deployment crashes involving FSD-equipped vehicles with much broader US crash statistics, while also benchmarking newer Teslas against the entire US vehicle fleet, which is significantly older on average.

Despite the flawed metrics, the Dutch regulator approved FSD in April, saying its decision was based on its own “tests, analyses and verifications,” and Tesla is now pushing for EU-wide clearance. A version of FSD is currently available in five European markets.

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Report: Microsoft weighs Xbox spin-off amid major overhaul

Microsoft is reportedly considering spinning out or restructuring its struggling Xbox unit, per The Information. While new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma, who took over in February, is preparing for layoffs, she’s simultaneously planning to boost investment in its biggest franchises like “Halo,” “Fallout,” and “Minecraft.”

The latest potential shake-up comes as the gaming division battles major headwinds, following a massive 33% plunge in Q3 console sales and a recent move to slash Game Pass prices while removing new “Call of Duty” titles.