THIS WEEK IN AI: Google's AI Laptop, Everyone Goes to China, Thinking Machines

**Josh** (0:00)
Google just launched the first laptop built for AI, and it's everything Apple said Siri would be, and a lot more. It's pretty awesome. The signature feature is this thing called a magic pointer, where you can wiggle your cursor over a date in an email, and Gemini will schedule a meeting. You hover it over a living room and a new couch, and Gemini will composite the two together and render what that would look like. You can ask it to plan a family reunion, and it builds these live dashboards with the flights, hotels, and countdowns, all built in natively to this new laptop, they're calling the Google Book. If you'll remember from 2011, there was a little thing called the Chromebook that revolutionized how we use laptops forever. Today, we have some new innovations from Google that are going to do that once again for the AI era. This laptop is pretty amazing, and it's one of many things that was announced at Google's IO conference yesterday.

**Ejaaz** (0:45)
This was surprising to me for many reasons. Number one, we are a week away from Google's flagship IO event, where we were expecting all these major AI announcements, and it seems like a week before, they're giving us three to four new updates.

**Josh** (0:59)
It's just the warm up.

**Ejaaz** (1:00)
Yeah, it's just the warm up, and I'm actually quite impressed. There was a sentence that was repeated twice across all of these announcements yesterday by Google, which was, we are moving from an operating system to an intelligence system. Now, what that means is, they're upgrading a traditional computer operating system to something that is more compatible with AI agents or AI models in general. It's a new way to interact in this new AI-powered world. Now, if that sounds familiar, that's because OpenAI announced something similar with the rumors of their upcoming phone, and we did an episode on that. Anyway, back to Google. What did they release?
On the hardware side of things, there's a brand new laptop which is engineered from the ground up to be suited towards Gemini, their flagship AI model. They also released a bunch of new software which includes something called Gemini Intelligence, which is basically their Gemini model, but actionable across all the different apps, tools and products, software products specifically that Google has. If you understand the Google model, they're vertically integrated. They have the model layer, the GPU layer, and they have all this amazing distribution through Google Maps, Google G Suite, and a bunch of other like Gmail as well. The point is, they created Gemini Intelligence to work across all of these things. If you wanted to order on DoorDash or if you wanted an AI agent to go scour your email and figure out what books you need to order for your syllabus at college, it can all do that seamlessly without you needing to prompt it on its own. Then on the ecosystem sides, one thing that I found interesting is they've now made it incredibly easy to port over all your Apple products and software data into the Google ecosystem, which is something that is very Android, very open-source, which is what Google is known for. But I'm excited about this. Now, the flagship product, I know you said it was the pointer, Josh. For me, it has to be the laptop, this new Google Book. It's pretty impressive.

**Josh** (2:49)
The Google Book is the national extension of the Chromebook. Now, if you remember way back in 2011, 15 years ago, Google released the Chromebook. This was a $200 laptop that was available basically to anyone. It was the first time that a device that powerful was accessible to the rest of the world. And what happened was, is that the Chromebook kind of ate the software stack, and they tried to make everything exist in the browser. So the Chromebook, if you remember, you can't actually download applications. Everything ran within Google Chrome. Now, the national extension that is happening again with the Google Book, where instead of the browser cannibalizing software, the AI is now cannibalizing the browser. And what we have as a result of this, is this thing that Google is calling Gemini Intelligence. And now Gemini Intelligence is basically that baked in operating system into this new device. The Chromebook itself is fairly beautiful. It looks somewhat similar to a MacBook, if you're familiar with the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro. It's kind of a hybrid between those two. They're pricing it at about $200 to $500.
So it's very competitive with the MacBook Neo, which is sitting just above at $600.
And I have a feeling that a lot of people are going to be interested in this because of the native AI features built in. Now, what you'll notice throughout this video is a lot of these features are actually baked into the being an extension of your phone. This currently works with Android phones. So if you are a Android user, this is probably an incredibly compelling product because in a way they're building the Apple ecosystem. They're building everything that Apple said they were going to do, but failed to deliver on in terms of software. And it serves as this really good companion to Android phones. Now, if you're an iOS user, this is probably more of a fun experimental laptop, but the MacBook Neo is still looking like it's a little bit more compelling than a laptop like this.