Google I/O 2026
My Thoughts on Google I/O 2026
TL;DR
Google I/O 2026 was quite good! But the model they released is not what everyone expected. It’s flashy, yes, but it’s 3x more expensive than the latest Flash model. Maybe the naming was a mistake. Besides that, the model is good for what it needs to do: bring Gemini to billions of users.
In fact, everything was built on top of this model, and what glues it all together is the new Antigravity, which is not just an IDE anymore. It’s more of a harness, like Codex or Claude Code.
Gemini Spark: the always-on AI agent powered by Google services, and potentially MCPs in the future.
The refreshed AI Studio now also has an Android app that builds Android apps.
And the new agent in Search looks really promising.
What Google Shipped
From the saved I/O recap tweets, the core AI releases were:
Gemini 3.5 Flash, now generally available
Gemini Omni, the Nano Banana of videos
Antigravity 2.0, CLI, and SDK
Managed Agents in the Gemini API: Here
Gemini Spark
AI Studio updates, including native Android support, Workspace integrations, and export to Antigravity
New SynthID partnerships. SynthID is a “watermark” for AI content.
New $100 Google AI Ultra subscription, while the maxed-out version went from $250 to $200.
New Universal Cart, which brings your shopping items together from Google, YouTube, and email.
Now, what do I think about this new model? I don’t like it. BUT it’s not a model for me, a power user. It’s a model for everyone, and that’s something most people didn’t get. As a builder, I would never use this when Composer 2.5 is better and just as fast, or when GPT 5.5 is better at basically everything. But this is the perfect model that Google will throw at all their users.
What do I think about Antigravity 2? It’s not good right now, but if they continue to improve it, it WILL be good eventually. But since the Codex app, t3Code, Conductor, Cursor, etc. are a thing, I cannot recommend it.
Gemini Omni is amazing, on par with Seedence 2.0, and Gemini Spark and Universal Cart will be the actual killer apps of this release.
Now let’s all wait for the Gemini 3.5 Pro model coming next month. I hope it gets some good ADHD pills.
Really good Recap Video:
Recap Tweet:
Good framing on Flash… It's not a frontier play, it's infrastructure. Google needed something fast and cheap enough to blanket Search, Workspace, and Android at scale. Benchmark comparisons against GPT or Claude are beside the point.
Antigravity as a Claude Code-style harness makes sense architecturally, but Google's track record of abandoning dev tools makes it hard to bet on. The SDK matters more than the IDE anyway.
Spark is the sleeper here, always-on agent with native Google service access is a serious moat if the UX doesn't get killed by privacy backlash.
Curious what 3.5 Pro looks like if Flash is already clearing 3.1 Pro benchmarks.