The conference showed off AI features coming to Google Search, and Donald Glover helped debut a new generative video app called Veo.
At Google’s annual developers conference, Google I/O, AI got a lot of mentions — over 120, by Google’s own count. There were the typical announcements of new software features the company hopes its developer community will take advantage of, and Google showed off the way it’s using the tech, including AI in search and AI in Android 15 (currently in beta).
With all the updates to its core AI tools — Gemini, DeepMind and more — Google CEO Sundar Pichai described this as « the Gemini era. » New apps take advantage of the upgrades, such as Ask Photos, AI Overviews, Imagen 3 and a lot more.
Just about every launch event by the major tech companies over the past year focused on how wonderful-fast-timesaving its AI models, developer tools, features and silicon are. That’s a signal that AI isn’t mainstream yet, and still in the major confusion phase. (We try to help demystify it all in our guide, AI Atlas.) But Google gave us 2 hours of AI and not much else.
The company didn’t talk about hardware at all, except for a shout out to new Trillium Tensor processors and that Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs are coming to its data centers, both in 2025. Plus, Axion TPUs are more energy efficient. It announced the Pixel 8A a week before the show.
For more of a minute-by-minute experience, we’ve archived our live blog, and you can find all our coverage of the event at our Google I/O hub.So what’s new with Gemini?
Gemini, the company’s ChatGPT competitor, has been updated to make it more conversational, have better cross-app compatibility and be smarter in general. Project Astra, « the future of AI assistants, » takes advantage of Gemini to make conversation more natural and caches info for faster response.
