Google I/O lands Gemini 3.5 Flash and agentic Search

At Tuesday's annual developer keynote, Google unveiled Gemini 3.5 Flash as its new default agentic model — 76.2% on Terminal-Bench 2.1, 83.6% on MCP Atlas, and roughly four-times faster output than other frontier models at less than half the cost. Gemini Spark, a personal always-on agentic assistant, rolls to trusted testers; Antigravity 2.0 lets developers spawn parallel subagents across multi-week workflows; and the existing Gemini CLI sunsets June 18 in favor of an Antigravity CLI rewrite in Go. Gemini 3.5 Pro is teed up for next month.

Google framed its biggest Search box upgrade in over 25 years around agents rather than answers. Information agents will monitor the web around the clock for user-set triggers like apartment listings or sports updates, agentic booking expands to local services and automated business calls, and generative UI builds custom dashboards and mini-apps inside the results page on the fly. AI Mode now defaults to Gemini 3.5 Flash worldwide across 98 languages, and a new Universal Cart is designed to follow a single shopping session across the open web.

OpenAI added two provenance signals to its image models: C2PA metadata identifying AI-generated content, and SynthID, Google's invisible watermark designed to survive screenshots and resizing. A preview verification tool checks for both signals, initially only on OpenAI-generated images. The move tightens the cross-lab consensus on detectability — Google created SynthID and adopted C2PA across its product suite, and OpenAI's adoption pushes both standards closer to defaults for the rest of the industry.

Google Research published ERA — Empirical Research Assistance — in Nature on May 19, an AI system using tree-search over thousands of candidates to write and optimize scientific code across genomics, public health, satellite imagery, neuroscience, and time-series forecasting. Concrete wins: ERA-built forecasts ranked at or near the top of the CDC's leaderboards for flu, COVID-19, and RSV; a California water-runoff model beat the state's official Bulletin 120 outlook; and a retail forecasting variant met or exceeded both commercial consensus and Chicago Fed estimates. Built on Gemini.

OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic this week to lead a new team using Claude to accelerate pre-training research, reporting to pre-training lead Nick Joseph. Karpathy left OpenAI in 2024 to found Eureka Labs, an AI-tutoring startup; he says he plans to resume that education work "in time" but wants back at the LLM frontier first. The signal: a researcher with his own education company sees pre-training as the highest-leverage place to be over the next few years — and Anthropic landed him over OpenAI.

Ocean, an agentic email-security startup, raised $28 million, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with angels including Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport and Armis co-founders Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael. The platform runs a custom small language model that reads each incoming email in organizational context to flag fraud and impersonation; it already reviews billions of messages a month for customers like Kayak, Kingston Technology, and Headspace. Founder Shay Shwartz, an ex-Israeli-defense researcher tied to Iron Dome, frames the bet bluntly: AI just industrialized spear-phishing, so the defense has to be AI too.

Mistral closed an acquisition of Linz-based Emmi AI, an Austrian engineering startup building physics-based simulation models for aerospace, automotive, semiconductors, and energy. Roughly 30 researchers and engineers join Mistral's team, and Linz becomes an official Mistral office. The combined pitch: real-time simulations and digital twins layered onto Mistral's platform to court industrial buyers in high-stakes manufacturing sectors. Terms were not disclosed; the deal closes in May 2026.