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Welcome to the Friday edition of our newsletter. We spend Fridays going deeper into tools and trends related to generative AI (and Tuesdays sharing news updates).

Google hosted its annual I/O developer conference last week, and the tech giant did not disappoint on the AI announcement front. Here’s a look at our favorite updates from the event, as well as a roundup of other I/O news.

In preparing for last week’s Hot GPT Summer 3, I noted to Snider that Google had yet to release any new Gemini models in 2026. Snider’s response to me: “Next week is Google I/O—they’ll surely announce a new Gemini model there.” And voila!, Gemini 3.5 Flash was announced at Google I/O!

What does Gemini 3.5 Flash offer? Right now, agentic workflows and coding are all the rage for LLMs, and Gemini 3.5 Flash delivers on both. With respect to agentic tasks, Gemini 3.5 Flash outperforms all other frontier models, including GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7, on several benchmarks, while on the coding front its performance on two major coding benchmarks nearly matches the performance of GPT-5.5. Moreover, in the category of multimodal understanding, which involves reasoning about visual information, Gemini 3.5 Flash surpasses all competitors.

The most surprising aspect of Gemini 3.5 Flash’s performance is that it brings this high level of performance while putting up a rate of output tokens per second that is 4 times faster than GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.7, and Claude Sonnet 4.6. As Google puts it, this proves “you no longer have to trade quality for latency.”

We often discuss the shift from “active” to “passive” AI in our talks about where AI is headed. Daily brief is a good example of that shift to passive AI. It’s a personalized morning digest that organizes your upcoming day. Instead of acting as traditional, reactive chatbot where you have to ask for updates, Daily Brief works proactively across your connected Google apps (Gmail, Calendar, Tasks) and prepares what you need to start your day.

Gemini uses its reasoning capabilities to determine what is most urgent or high-stakes for your day (highlighting an upcoming flight or a high-priority meeting). It goes beyond basic text summarization by suggesting immediate, actionable next steps based on your schedule and emails, making it built for quick skimming.

This was born out of Labs project Google CC (another of my favorites), and it’s impressive right out of the box.

Moda's viral launch hit 4.4 million views in two days. Tens of thousands of professionals signed up. Startups, agencies, forward-thinking brands and top firms are now using Moda to create brand-aligned slides, ad creative, reports, social carousels and more.

Most AI tools tend to create what we call "AI slop": repetitions of the same colors, layouts and fonts. And when you try to fix it, you get stuck in a loop of re-prompting.

Moda is different. Drop in your website URL, and Moda learns your brand from the ground up: your colors, your fonts, your visual language. Then it helps you generate pro-quality slides, docs, and marketing assets. 

The best part? Every layer is fully editable on a real canvas, and exports to powerpoint, PDF and more.

Try Moda Free Today

Gemini Spark: Your 24/7 Virtual Assistant
Gemini Spark is Google's flagship personal AI agent, running in the cloud so it can work even when your device is turned off. It integrates with Workspace (Gmail, Docs, Sheets) and third-party apps like OpenTable and InstaCart to autonomously handle complex tasks, like tracking down sneaky subscription fees or organizing a block party.

Gemini Omni: Conversational Video Editing and Generation
Google introduced Gemini Omni (starting with Omni Flash), a powerful "world model" that understands real-world physics, motion, and character continuity. Instead of just creating a clip from a text prompt, it allows you to dynamically edit videos using natural voice commands. For example, users can point to an object in a video and tell the AI to change its material or style while keeping the rest of the scene intact.

Google Search: The Biggest Redesign in Decades
Google Search is shifting from a standard query box to an “intelligent search box” powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash. Users can now drop images, videos, files, and entire browser tabs directly into search, yielding dynamic, custom-generated layouts and background “information agents” that actively track things like apartment listings or flight prices for you.

“Ask YouTube” & “Docs Live”: Voice-First Productivity
Google announced a wave of voice-powered tools across its ecosystem, headlined by Ask YouTube, which lets you ask complex questions about videos and jumps you directly to the exact relevant clips instead of making you watch the full video. Simultaneously, Docs Live allows users to speak naturally to brainstorm and dictate, while the AI formats the speech into a polished document with structured edits and citations.

Android XR Smart Glasses: Gemini Extends to Wearables
On the hardware front, Google previewed smart glasses developed in partnership with Samsung and Warby Parker. The first-generation models arriving later this year focus on audio and voice interaction, utilizing built-in cameras and speakers so Gemini can answer questions about the physical world happening right in front of you.

Google Pics: A Canva-Style Creative Canvas for Workspace
Google unveiled Pics, a new standalone web app built on its Nano Banana model that brings precise, collaborative image generation and editing into Google Workspace. It eliminates the random nature of standard AI generation by introducing object segmentation - allowing you to physically click, resize, move, or change the color of specific elements — alongside shareable canvases for real-time team editing.

SynthID + C2PA Expansion: Built-In Deepfake Detection
Google is bringing massive transparency upgrades to daily browsing by baking DeepMind’s SynthID invisible watermarking and C2PA cryptographically signed metadata directly into Search, Chrome, and the Gemini app. This expansion allows users to right-click an image in Chrome, use Circle to Search on Android, or query Gemini to instantly see if a piece of media was captured by a real camera, edited, or entirely generated by AI.