Our Field Trip to Google I/O + A Sit-Down With Sundar Pichai + System Update

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Kevin Roose** (0:35)
Casey, I couldn't help but notice that during much of the IO keynote, you were on your phone playing Bellatro and doing emails on your laptop.

**Casey Newton** (0:43)
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.

**Kevin Roose** (0:52)
This is the promise of AGI. Soon we will be able to play Bellatro wherever we are.

**Casey Newton** (0:56)
You can pay attention to nothing and be fine. Welcome to the future.

**Kevin Roose** (1:08)
I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at The New York Times.

**Casey Newton** (1:10)
I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

**Kevin Roose** (1:12)
And this is Hard Fork.

**Casey Newton** (1:13)
This week, it's our annual field trip to Google IO. 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.

**Kevin Roose** (1:26)
Did you delay it? Yeah. You're always doing that.

**Casey Newton** (1:43)
Well, Kevin, the keynote just wrapped up here at IO. 2026 What did you think?

**Kevin Roose** (1:49)
Yes, this is like the Coachella of Capitalism, the Warped Tour of the Web, the Lollapalooza of links. I could keep going.

**Casey Newton** (2:02)
Please don't.

**Kevin Roose** (2:04)
And they are doing a lot. We heard about everything from like agentic search to these new like video editing models and products that they have, all the way to Demis Asabis at the end of the keynote declaring that we are in the foothills of the singularity.

**Demis Hassabis** (2:21)
When we look back at this time, I think we will realize that we were standing in the foothills of the singularity.

**Kevin Roose** (2:28)
I love that like Google's version of the Steve Jobs, like one more thing is like, one more thing, the singularity.
A great way to end. So yeah, what was your standout? What did they announce that caught your eye?

**Casey Newton** (2:43)
I mean, they have said that they just made the biggest change to search in 25 years. I think time will tell if that is truly as significant a change as they're suggesting, because when we saw it in the demos, it just looked like the box grows if you type more into it. But they're also saying that by this summer, they're going to be generating custom user interfaces based on your query and a bunch of other stuff. I think a through line through everything that they discussed here was coming this summer or coming to a group of trusted testers.
With these productivity tools, until they're in your hands, you don't really know if anything has changed in your life or not.

**Kevin Roose** (3:22)
Yeah, there was a lot of focus on agentic stuff like agentic coding. They have this new agentic search mode, which basically is the fancy upgrade to Google Alerts.
You can have it sort of tell you when there's like a new home listed on Zillow or a new baseball score you might care about or something like that. I was really interested that they seem to be betting very big on cost and speed. So their new model that they talked about today was Gemini 3.5 Flash, which is the newest version, but it's also they say four times faster and much cheaper than the other leading frontier models. So I think Google's strategy of betting on scale and distribution and making their models as efficient to serve as possible is really the direction they're going in. They don't seem to care about having the absolute most cutting edge models as long as they can serve them cheaply and quickly to billions of people.

**Casey Newton** (4:20)
I mean, I think they care about it. I think that they just haven't built it yet. Fast and cheap is what you talk about when it isn't the best.