TL;DR: This year, instead of focusing on engineering benchmarking or tools, Google unveiled a flood of AI-powered consumer features and product integrations at its annual developer conference. The two biggest announcements: The company is reinventing Search into an AI-first interface and wants to make OpenClaw-style agents mainstream.

Let me google that for you: Google is retooling its core product before someone else beats it to the punch. The updated search box is changing (for the first time in 25 years) and will now support longer questions, follow-up conversations, and attachments like photos, videos, documents, and Chrome tabs. And it can dispatch agents to scan the web for you. (Here’s what the new Search will look like.) The goal: Search will become more like a personal assistant—planning your trips, helping you shop, creating schedules, and giving summaries and ongoing updates. Goodbye, blue links. We hardly knew ye.

Agents for all: Google also wants to make you use an AI agent, whether you like it or not. So far, agent adoption has been shaky. While Silicon Valley has been deep in OpenClaw, it hasn't quite hit, say, Toledo, and getting agents running has required either technical know-how or a lot of patience.

Besides agentic integration into the new Search, Google also announced Gemini Spark, a 24/7 personal agent running on Google's cloud across Gmail, Chrome, and Workspace, as well as Daily Brief, an agent that creates a morning digest. Spark will hit Google AI Ultra and some business users in beta next week. As Platformer observed, Google probably hopes this is its ChatGPT moment for agents. Or, as one headline put it, “If Google can’t make AI agents useful, maybe no one can.”

Also announced: Gemini models for the “tokenmaxxing hangover” era, a new image-generating app, smart glasses designed with very fashionable partners (but, please, don’t call them smart glasses). Oh, and YouTube’s search is also getting an overhaul. While Google did hit consumers with a lot, some pointed out the company may also have a branding problem. “Let me Gemini, Flash, Omni, Nano Banana, Spark, or Flow that for you” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Bottom line: As Google stares down an existential threat to its market share in the AI era, the company’s strategy is to weave the technology into all of the products consumers already use. —AC

• Orbital drug manufacturing just got its first real commercial customer. Last week, United Therapeutics Corporation announced a deal to manufacture drugs in orbit with space startup Varda Space Industries, focusing on rare lung disease treatments. This is the first time a large, publicly traded pharma company has funded in-orbit manufacturing from its own balance sheet rather than NASA grants. Varda's uncrewed capsules, equipped with autonomous bioreactors, will spend weeks in orbit processing the compounds—molecules assemble in microgravity more slowly and consistently, yielding crystal structures with better stability and longer shelf life—before returning to Earth. Varda has three more vehicles launching this year and plans to ramp to seven missions in 2027.
• NASA's newest processor could give future spacecraft an autopilot. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory published results last week on a processor developed with Microchip Technology (a chip manufacturer). The chip packs modern smartphone-style processing into a radiation-hardened package built to survive deep space, and is already benchmarking at 500 times the performance of chips on the James Webb Space Telescope and the Mars rovers, according to NASA. This could allow future spacecraft to detect unexpected events and respond autonomously, without waiting hours for commands from Earth—much like an aircraft autopilot. It's targeting certification for the 2028 Artemis IV crewed moon landing. —SM

Attention all Kens: Meta’s CEO and his wife Priscilla Chan have an exciting job opportunity at their totally uncontroversial sprawling compound in Kauai, Hawaii. The Zuckerberg family office is hiring a seasonal “beach water person”, which, per the job description, is basically a lifeguard with some additional duties. Reef-safe sunscreen experience should be a plus—given the boss once covered his face in so much mineral sunscreen while surfing that he went viral for looking like No-Face from Spirited Away. (He later admitted it was because he didn’t want to be recognized. It did not work.)

As for what “beach water person” means—according to Wired, which asked Meta’s chatbot, it means thalassophile (a person who loves to be in or near the ocean). Hey, if you get the job, at least "seasonal thalassophile” could make for a good fun fact on your dating app bio. —LC

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