Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Casey, I couldn't help but notice that during much of the I.O. keynote, you were on your phone playing Bellatro and doing emails on your laptop.
Well, you know, when you have your agent recording the entire thing and transcribing it for you, you can just sort of glance up every few seconds and see if a news event is happening. It's actually really amazing the future we're living in. This is the promise of AGI. Soon we will be able to play Bellatro wherever we are. You can pay attention to nothing and be fine. Welcome to the future.
I'm Kevin Ruse, a tech columnist at The New York Times. I'm Casey Noon from Platformer.
And this is Hard Fork. This week, it's our annual field trip to Google I.O. We have all the big news, plus our conversation with Google CEO Sundar Pichai. And then some other highlights from the week with our system update. You know, I told that to install last night, but it didn't.
Did you delay it? Yeah. You're always doing that.
Well, Kevin, the keynote just wrapped up here at I.O. 2026. What did you think?
Yes, this is like the Coachella of capitalism, the Warped Tour of the web, the Lollapalooza of links. Mm-hmm. I can keep going. Please don't. And they are doing a lot.
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Chapter 2: What were the biggest announcements at Google I/O this year?
ask it to do yeah i i think that was actually my one of my favorite parts because i am currently running a clawed swarm on my open laptop doing what what is it doing and what they have said is that you can now do that through gemini spark this new agent thing and it will run in like a virtual machine on the cloud so you don't have to like keep your laptop cracked uh like an insane person kevin please what are you doing with your i can't tell you you can't even
Because you're not doing anything.
I'm ushering in the singularity.
You're generating recipes. I'm building a bioweapon. But I don't want to say that in this crowd. They get sensitive about that sort of thing around here.
Yes. So what was the vibe of I.O. this year?
I mean, honestly, the only people that I have talked to are reporters and people who work at Google. So I feel like we have not really had a chance yet to talk to developers and see what is on their minds. Clearly, they have a lot of new toys to play with, and I'm sure they're excited about that. But as I said, until you get your hands on them, you don't really know if your life has changed.
Yeah, I feel like they have confidence in their sort of place in the front of the pack. I don't think they believe that their models are the best in the world yet, but if they're cheaper and faster and they can do more stuff, they have this new Omni model that can take in video as well as images and text.
So I feel like they're sort of doing the spray and pray approach to AI development, which is you just do everything everywhere all at once and hope that something hits. And it's worked for them.
Yeah. And I guess I will say one thing about the vibe here at I.O. this morning, Kevin, which is this is the only recent gathering of a large number of people where mentions of AI did not produce a large chorus of boos. This was a crowd where people actually seemed like they wanted to hear about new AI developments.
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Chapter 3: How is Google changing its search box after 25 years?
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.
We should also disclose that we both use Google.
I'm a longtime Google user. I was part of the Gmail beta in 2004. Wow, you're old. So old.
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Sundar Pichai, welcome back to Hard Fork. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Thank you.
So the last time we had you on the show was in 2023. BARD, RIP, had just come out. And I think at the time, the perception was that Google was catching up in AI. How are you feeling about your position in the race these days?
Well, that brings back memories.
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Chapter 4: What is Google's new agentic search mode and how does it work?
So you have these cadences and they may not exactly match up. I think the moment is intense enough that if you're slightly off, you know, Three months ago, people were like, we are ahead and no one could catch up with us. And then now the conversation flips, but that's part of the territory of being at the frontier. I think we are the only large company which is actually at that frontier, right?
So one way to think about it is there are, in this moment, There are a couple of startups which have made extraordinary progress. And we've been deeply working on this for a long time. I think we took a big step forward with 3.5 Flash. It does address some of the areas we've been behind.
And I think, obviously, getting it out in the real world and iterating with that data coming back is going to really help us. I think coding was the area where getting access to the data flows was important. I think we maybe quite didn't have the surface like Cloud Code as an example, or what Anthropic maybe had with Cursor too. And so getting anti-gravity with 2.0.
We've been using it internally at Google for a while. I shared the token usage at Google IO. I've never seen anything like it internally, right? We are doubling every week and people are really putting the models to work. And so that is helping us hill climb quite a bit. But, you know, the frontier is very dynamic, but I'm very, very optimistic and confident we'll push through there.
It sounds like if there's any place where you feel maybe not quite at the very lead where you actually want to be, it is coding.
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Chapter 5: What are the key features of Gemini 3.5 Flash?
Is that right? Is that where you're sort of putting the pressure?
Look, I think coding ends up being very foundational in everything we do. So I think it's an important frontier to be on. There are areas in coding where we've been very good. We've been very, very good at creating single-shot web frontends, everything, but in terms of this long-running task where serious developers are working on complicated code bases, I think we are making progress.
It is just that there is a gap to the frontier where others are, but we are well aware of it and making progress there.
3.5 Flash has been out for a day. I do think it typically takes a few days to really put these models through their paces. We have seen some complaints, though, about pricing, model quality. Curious what you've made of the reception so far.
You know, it's... I'm looking forward to being done with my interviews and so on so that I can spend more time with the teams.
Yeah, wrap it up, Luis.
No. Look, I'm gonna meet the teams right after this. I think we are definitely, it'll take a day or two to settle in. I think it's a new model. I'm in a new area where we've made some progress. There could be some regressions, but we will be able to quickly address them through our post-training, pretty quickly, I think.
There are some artifacts and behaviors we are seeing, which I think are easy to address, so we will. I do think given It was a day after us putting out a lot of things. I think we had tightened usage limits to avoid outages, but you will see us make progress on usage limits very soon. That is rightfully a source of frustration when you encounter, I feel the same,
But those are areas we will address pretty soon and make progress.
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