Katherine Blunt and Rolfe Winkler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal from Google I/O (gift link):
Google is supercharging its Gemini artificial-intelligence model
to become more competitive in the era of agentic AI.The company has started rolling out what it calls Gemini Spark, a
personal agent it says is capable of navigating a user’s digital
life and acting on his or her behalf. The agent will work across
many of Google’s products and run on the company’s cloud
infrastructure. […]The company has been testing Spark with a limited number of users
and plans to make it available next week to those who pay for AI
Ultra, a new subscription tier that costs $100 a month.
A different top-level takeaway than the NYT’s, which in turn was different from Bloomberg’s.
Ben Thompson, in a subscriber-only update at Stratechery, sums it up:
Indeed, if you wanted a positive spin on Google’s plethora of
announcements, it’s that the company is clearly fully committed to
putting AI into anything and everything; if you want to put a
negative spin, well, it’s the exact same thing. One of the
enduring critiques of Google is that the company is unfocused and
unmanageable, which, to the extent this keynote was a
manifestation of the company it represents, the shoe fits.
I personally find Google I/O days very hard to follow. My brain doesn’t jibe with the sprawling nature of the company. This year this was particularly so.
