Google

At Google I/O, everything is changing and normal and scary and chill

At its annual developer conference, the company seeks to reassure everyone that AI is for everyday utility — but the great disruption to the web continues

Casey Newton

May 20, 2025 — 10 min read

Sundar Pichai delivers the keynote Tuesday at Google I/O (Casey Newton / Platformer)

Here's this week's free edition of Platformer: my field report from Google I/O, where I met with executives and surveyed the landscape to understand what the company's AI plans meant for the rest of us.

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This is a column about AI. My boyfriend works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here.

MOUNTAIN VIEW — Last year, it was "let Google do the Googling for you."

This year, you can do the danged Googling yourself.

At Google I/O on Tuesday, the company made a noticeable shift in the way it talks about artificial intelligence. Last year, the company wanted us to sit back and watch its primitive agents read the web on our behalf. This year, the company asks us to sit up straight, pay it $250, and get to work.

At I/O this year, the AI works best when you work, too. A sizzle reel that airs early during the two-hour keynote encourages us to run physics simulations, turn images into code, build robots, and write code via voice instructions.

Thirty ideas for how to work with AI flash on the screen, and when that's done, the AI offers 30 more.

"We are in a new phase of the AI platform shift," CEO Sundar Pichai tells us, "where decades of research are becoming reality for people all over the world."

At I/O, Pichai and a procession of executives offer their version of this reality. It's a world where AI is a coworker and a superpower. Where endless drudgery is automated away, without ever seeming to threaten anyone's job. Where the AI search results are so good that people use Google more than ever, and rely on the web more than ever.

It's a reality where software engineers see many of the benefits first. Google I/O is the rare Big Tech developer conference that actually addresses developers in its main keynote address. To warm up the crowd, two Googlers vibe-code a to-do list app on stage. (Last year, the show opened with a DJ.) An "asynchronous coding agent" named Jules makes its debut, and another Googler builds an interactive photo-viewing app as all of us watch.

Amid the flurry of announcements, it can be difficult to understand which might be meaningful to you. The list is staggering both in length and in the variety of product names it contains — which, in keeping with Google tradition, bear no relation to what they do. (Unless perhaps "Project Mariner" conjured up for you a vision of automated web browsing?)

Also, the products overlap. Would you like to search with AI? You can now do that in Google search, and get an AI Overview; or (as of today) in another tab within Google search, called AI Mode; or inside Gemini, the standalone AI search app.

I would love to tell you that all of these are the same, but Google takes pains to explain to us the ways in which they are different.

Gemini, product of DeepMind, first offered Deep Research, and today brings us Deep Think. How deeply you might want a model to research, or think, and what you might expect to get back from clicking those buttons, are left as exercises to the user.

Google's stock drops 1.5 percent.

The announcements fly by. The effect is hypnotic — calming, even. The AI is getting better, and everything is getting just a little more AI.

Mostly not right now, though. The new features are now in testing, or will be tested this summer, or later this year. The disruptions to come will come just a little bit later.

Other AI labs talk about artificial general intelligence, or superintelligence; a country of geniuses in a data center. Not Google; not today. Onstage, the head of search is planning a trip to Nashville with AI, and a VP of engineering is showing videos of some science experiments he did with his kids this weekend.

Everything is changing, but not too much, and not too fast.

There is slop, of course. A new image model that can render text, like OpenAI's; and a new video model that will also generate sounds. In an AI-generated video clip, a slop owl noisily flaps its wings while descending on a badger for a brief conversation. The dialogue makes no sense.

In another sizzle reel, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky says that his production company is working with Google to make videos using AI. In the first, a woman says she has made a short film about her own gestation and birth, and used AI to render the unfilmable parts. "To be honest, I never thought about telling the story of the day I was born," she tells us. "But here we are."

Later, the company introduces a new tool to help people determine whether the slop they are looking at was made with Google AI.

Snap out of this fever dream long enough and you can spot hints of the world that is coming into existence. Gmail is learning how to write in your voice, and will begin to do so later this year. The camera screen will chat with you while you are fixing your bike, telling you what to do every step of the way. NotebookLM will start generating TED talk-like videos of your PDFs for you to watch.

An executive on stage says that before too long you will be able to generate a how-to video for almost any subject you like.

And while the company continues to protest, it seems obvious that this new world will give you many fewer reasons to visit the open web. Google will generate the things you once searched for, and all the businesses that once relied on those searches will need a Plan B. This doesn’t get mentioned on stage, but Google's head of search, Liz Reid, gives away the game to David Pierce at The Verge.

“I think the search results page was a construct,” she says. The way we’ve all Googled for two decades was largely a response to the structure of the web itself: web pages in, web pages out. Good AI models are now able to get around that structure, and find and synthesize information from lots of sources. Now the question for Google, Reid says, is “is the information just presented to you, or is it presented to you in a way that feels as useful as you would like it to be?”

Another way of saying that "the search results page was a construct" is that the search results page is a relic. Google has all the information it needs now, and it has a lot of ideas for making it useful. Searching is a big market, but "doing" is a bigger one. So why ask Google to do the Googling for you, when really that's the least it can do?

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