Linked List: May 20, 2026

Wednesday, 20 May 2026

The Verge: ‘The 13 Biggest Announcements at Google I/O 2026’ ★

Andrew Liszewski and Stevie Bonifield, writing for The Verge (gift link):

Google’s I/O 2026 keynote today was once again full of AI-related announcements including a new family of Gemini 3.5 AI models, new features for Search and Gmail, and updates about its Project Aura smart glasses.

If you weren’t able to tune into the event’s livestream today or follow along with our live blog, you can catch up on everything you missed in our roundup below.

This roundup was the only way I could really make sense out of Google I/O.

WSJ: ‘Google Unveils New Gemini AI Agent for Personal Tasks’ ★

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.

NYT: ‘Powered by A.I., Google Changes Its Search Box for the First Time in 25 Years’ ★

Tripp Mickle, Kate Conger, and Brian X. Chen, opening The New York Times’s report on yesterday’s Google I/O keynote (gift link):

For 25 years, Google’s iconic search box was a long, slender bar where people typed in keywords like “World Cup.”

But over the past three years, artificial intelligence allowed people to type in longer, more complex questions like “Who are the top 24 teams in the World Cup and what chance does the United States have of advancing?”

On Tuesday, Google said the A.I. shift had inspired it to overhaul the dimensions of its search bar for the first time since 2001. The box is getting bigger and more interactive so that people can ask even longer questions and upload photographs and videos into queries.

Interesting to me that this is the Times’s biggest takeaway. But it speaks to how unchanged the google.com homepage has been since its earliest days.

In addition, people can ask follow-up questions with a chatbot on Google’s main search page. The company will also offer digital assistants, known as agents, to automate searches so that someone who may be apartment hunting can be notified of a new listing without opening a real estate site like Zillow.

Odd, to me, to paint this only in terms of user convenience (ostensible user convenience at that), and not in terms of this being a de facto attack on Zillow and the rest of the web. Later in the Times report:

Richard Kramer, a financial analyst with Arete Research, said the changes were helping Google make more money from advertising. Last year, Google’s ad clicks rose 6 percent, and it charged 7 percent more for each click. The company’s annual profit has more than doubled since 2022 to $132 billion.

“The open web is on its way out,” Mr. Kramer said, referring to the way internet traffic now often begins and ends with a visit to Google rather than visiting other sites. “With A.I., Google is reducing everyone to raw data providers.”

What an odd statement to include in the middle of an article without any acknowledgement of what a profound loss that would be, if Kramer is correct. It’s as though Kramer said that light mode is on its way out, everyone is into dark mode these days.

‘You Do Not Need Fancy Equipment, You Do Not Need a Degree, to Make Money and to Do This as Your Job’ ★

22-year-old pop singer-songwriter Brye, on TikTok:

“Lemons”, my biggest song ever, that went like super viral during quarantine back in 2020, was actually produced, if you can believe it, in GarageBand on my school iPad.

My high school gave us all iPads and I produced “Lemons” on there. I used to just like make beats on GarageBand in high school. I wrote musicals for my school with GarageBand on my iPad. And then I made that little demo for “Lemons”, recorded it ... on my iPad ... with my horrible little plug-in mic, posted it to spite a guy who was being horrible to me, and it blew up.

All of this to say, how crazy is it that a song that could be on Sirius XM radio — streamed a hundred million times, literally charted on the global top like viral 50 or whatever — it was literally made on GarageBand. You do not need fancy equipment, you do not need a degree, to make money and to do this as your job.

Obviously it’s good to learn. It’s fun to upgrade. But if you are working on a budget, GarageBand’s free on any Apple device.

If Brye’s story isn’t exactly what Steve Jobs was talking about when he introduced GarageBand in 2004 and GarageBand for iPad in 2011, well, I don’t know what is. Right down to the fact that she did it on school equipment. Her enthusiasm for the simplicity of the kit she used to record “Lemons” is contagious.

John Ternus (or whatshisname ... Tim Cook) should send this video to every single employee at Apple and tell them that this — this — is exactly Apple’s mission. To empower creative people to create great new things they didn’t believe were possible with the tools already in their hands.