Five Things AI: Google AI/O, Coding Future, AI Future, AI Jokes
There is so much AI out there! Find out what it does!
Heya and welcome back to Five Things AI!
This week's reading list covers a lot of ground: Google revealed that its real product is no longer search but an agentic operating layer stitching together everything it owns; Anthropic hosted a room full of developers who cheerfully admitted to shipping code they had not read; a Wired piece confirmed that AI has well and truly escaped the lab and is now everyone's problem whether they opted in or not; OpenAI's model disproved an 80-year-old maths assumption but still cannot solve the actual problem; and apparently the one thing AI genuinely cannot do is be funny. A full week in five links — grab a coffee.
Google I/O 2026 Was Not Just a Model Launch. It Was Google Showing the Agent Stack.
The signal is that Google is stitching together models, tools, sandboxes, browsers, Search, Workspace, Android, Chrome, and Cloud into one agentic operating layer. That sounds abstract until you line up the announcements. Gemini 3.5 Flash is the reasoning and action model. Antigravity is the orchestration harness. Managed Agents give developers cloud-hosted execution environments. Spark brings background agents into the Gemini app and Workspace. Search uses the same model-and-harness combination to build custom interfaces, dashboards, and trackers. Gemini Omni extends the same ambition into multimodal creation. Chrome and WebMCP try to make the web legible to agents.
Google really delivered on the agentic promise this week.
Anthropic’s Code with Claude showed off coding’s future—whether you like it or not
It’s not news that LLM-powered tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex have upended the way software gets made. Top tech companies now like to boast of how little code their developers write by hand. (“Most software at Anthropic is now written by Claude,” Hadfield said. “Claude has written most of the code in Claude Code.”) OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft make similar claims. Many others wish they could.
Even so, it is striking how normal this new paradigm already seems, and how fast it has set in. This was the second year that Anthropic has put on developer events, which also run in San Francisco and Tokyo. This time last year, the company had just released Claude 4. It could code, kind of. But with Anthropic’s latest string of updates—especially Claude 4.6 and then 4.7, released in February and April—Claude Code is a tool that more and more developers seem happy to hand their work off to.
Writing code is so last year.
AI Has Broken Containment
The newly chaotic and inescapable state of AI is the result of two inflection points. The first came at the start of the year, when AI agents exploded in popularity. Products such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex don’t just talk to you; they can do things on your behalf—code, trade stocks, analyze spreadsheets, generate slide decks, and even create Amazon listings. The technology’s once-questionable economic value became very clear, very quickly, to a large number of businesses, which have clamored to incorporate agents alongside, or in lieu of, their human employees. As agents have swarmed the workplace, nearly three-quarters of employed Americans think AI will decrease overall job opportunities and 30 percent of Americans are concerned that AI will make their own job obsolete.
AI truly has an image problem, which stems from people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk, but also from executives who cannot think about creative new possibilities with AI, but rather just use it to cut jobs.
OpenAI makes breakthrough on 80-year-old maths problem
“For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed the best possible solutions looked roughly like square grids,” OpenAI wrote on X. “An OpenAI model has now disproved that belief, discovering an entirely new family of constructions that performs better.”
While the work has excited mathematicians, the broader problem remains unsolved because the AI did not come up with a new answer for how fast the pairs of dots rise, but merely showed that the limit Erdős proposed was too low.
AI will advance science in so many ways, it will be breathtaking.
Why Can’t AI Tell Jokes?
Despite AI being able to assist with science and knowing everything on the internet, it hasn’t come up with any novel scientific results on its own. That’s surprising. By default, I would expect that someone who learned everything in all of science would figure out lots of new insights. And yet the number of wholly AI-driven scientific discoveries is precisely zero.
It seems that AI has trouble with creativity. There’s some important sense in which it’s good at applying existing knowledge but not generating brand new ideas. Arguably, AI’s two biggest technical defects are inability to continually learn and limited creativity.
Claude at least tries to have a sense of humor, but now I understand why this is so hard.
