Google’s AI Vision: Make Tech Human Again

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I found myself shaking my head in disbelief and surprisingly emotional throughout the entire two days of Google I/O, the company’s annual developer conference that was held this week. The recording artist Toro y Moi kicked off the event with an AI-powered live music set, but it was his closing words that captured what I'd feel for the next 48 hours: "We're here today to see each other in person, and it's great to remember that people matter."

Since 2015 I’ve known AI could fundamentally change the world, but this was the first time I felt so clearly and viscerally that it’s actually happening—right now. Surprisingly, it might make our world more human, not less.

At every table I sat down at, strangers would look up with wonder in their eyes, desperate to talk about what they'd just seen. In just two days, Google announced more new products and technical advances than most companies have in their entire existence: Video generation tools Veo 3 and Flow took the internet by storm with generative media that was miles better than anything ever seen before. Gemini diffusion, a new type of architecture for language models, teased a not-so-distant future where these models are 20 times faster and can create full apps in the blink of an eye. Unreleased mixed-reality glasses with a built-in screen translated languages and streamed video live.

In all, there were literally 100 announcements. It was overwhelming. And it’s not like Google was saving up for this: The company casually released an updated Gemini 2.5 Pro—a model that was comfortably topping nearly every benchmark (at least until Claude 4 Opus’s release yesterday)—on a random Tuesday a few weeks ago.

There are plenty of great write-ups covering each release in detail. This is not one of them.

Instead, I want to talk about what the tsunami of releases adds up to. Google calls it its “Gemini Era” after its flagship AI models. This is what exponential growth looks like: We're hitting the knee of the curve where compounding gains suddenly become undeniably visible. Google has managed to align its immense resources, people, and vision toward a single clear goal—artificial general intelligence (AGI).

What does Google mean when it says AGI? Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google's AI laboratory DeepMind, explained they're building toward AI that deeply understands our physical environment and the context we live in, beyond just symbols like math and language as current models do. AGI of this form would enable a universal AI assistant to “crack some areas of science, maybe one day some fundamental physics,” he said. Crucially, he believes this intelligence can amplify what makes us human, not replace it.

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Google's unique advantage

Google has brilliant AI researchers, but that’s not why they're winning...

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1. How Google's Search product provides creative constraints that propel the company forward
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