Casey Newton

You like to surround yourself with kind of awe-inspiring intelligence.

Which is why we're hosting this podcast together.

Yeah, and I think part of this is just that the cycle of kind of IO and developer conferences is maybe out of step with how these models are actually being built.

I've been hearing some whispers from folks at Google that they are working on something that is more powerful, but that it just may not have been ready in time for IO this year.

So I think that's one tricky thing about doing these conferences once a year is kind of every deadline has to line up at exactly the same time or else you end up looking like you're behind.

Yeah.

Did it meet your expectations?

Yeah, I think that basically meets my expectations.

I talked to one reporter who was walking around at I.O.

and who said it was like mid sort of like, you know, it's like good.

It's good.

It's a better position than they were in a couple of years ago at I.O.

when they were basically scrambling to get barred out the door and everything looked like it was going sideways.

So they found their footing, but it is still not clear whether they are producing a model that will truly be state of the art.

Mm hmm.

All right, so that is some more of our thoughts and early hands-on impressions of Gemini 3.5 Flash.

Now let's head down to Google to talk to Sundar.

And because I imagine we might want to ask Sundar a question or two about AI, let's make our disclosures.

I work at the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity.

And my fiance works at Anthropic.