New Models, Google IO, and a Papal Encyclical

AI Humor

Google Makes It Simple, Right? Right?

Later in the issue, I’ll be listing some of the very, very many updates Google announced to their models during Google I/O. Navigating all of their changes is a bit problematic as Nathan Clark notes below.

Nathan Clark wrote:

it’s in gemini, just create it in ai studio. oh, that’s for your personal google one account. for workspace you need gemini business. no, not gemini advanced, that’s ai pro now. unless you need ai ultra. oh agents? you do that in spark actually. no, not gemini api managed agents, that’s different. for coding use jules. unless you mean the agentic ide, that’s antigravity. no, that’s the old antigravity, download the new one. actually gemini cli is being deprecated, use antigravity cli. no the flash model is smarter than the pro model. unless you need pro. if it’s video, use flow. no, flow uses veo. no, nano banana is images. actually that’s in gemini now. unless you’re in search, then it’s ai mode. no, research is notebooklm. anyway it’s all very simple.

Normally, I like to have more jokes, but Twitter let me down this week.

Model Update Rumors

GPT 5.6

Pankaj Kumar wrote:

- OpenAI researchers hinted that the model behind a recent major math breakthrough is already being used internally as a daily driver for debugging and technical work
- Internal testing tags iris-alpha, ember-alpha, and beacon-alpha were spotted during development, potentially pointing toward multiple GPT-5.6 variants being tested
- GPT-5.6 seems heavily focused on stronger multi-step reasoning, better agentic workflows, and improved frontend generation capabilities
- Canary testing references are already appearing in developer environments, the same quiet rollout pattern seen before GPT-5.5 launched
- Current leaks point toward two models arriving: GPT-5.6 and GPT-5.6 Pro
- GPT-5.6, Sonnet 4.8, and Gemini 3.5 Pro are all expected in June, next month is looking like an AI festival

Claude Sonnet 4.8

Pankaj Kumar wrote:

Claude Sonnet 4.8 Leaks

- Anthropic accidentally shipped a massive 512,000-line internal debugging source map through a Claude Code npm update on March 31, 2026
- The leaked source code references Sonnet 4.8 inside unreleased keyword filters, strongly suggesting Anthropic is skipping Sonnet 4.7 entirely
- Sonnet 4.8 is expected to inherit vision upgrades from Opus 4.7, reportedly pushing visual accuracy above 98% for UI mockups and messy architecture diagrams
- A major coding boost with cleaner one pass completions and much more literal instruction following
- A new "X high" reasoning effort tier may also be coming for stronger logic without extremely long generation times
Updated tokenizer may use 30% more tokens on the same prompts compared to older Sonnet versions
- Currently expected around mid to late June

Grok Foundation V9-Medium (1.5T)

Elon Musk wrote:

Grok foundation model V9-Medium (1.5T) has finished training. Evals look good. A lot of Cursor data was added in supplementary training and there is more to come.

Fine-tuning is underway and reinforcement learning begins in a few days. 2 to 3 weeks to public release.

This will be a major improvement over the 0.5T v8-small that currently serves all Grok production traffic, especially for difficult coding tasks.

Google IO

Google recently had their big conference which was accompanied with a slew of announcements. Seriously, they are releasing A LOT of updates. I’m only listing a couple, but the first one is a link to a thread that goes through all of the ones Google wanted to highlight.

Google Gemini wrote:

We announced a lot of Gemini updates at GoogleIO, including:
- A complete redesign of the Gemini experience with Neural Expressive
- Agentic experiences coming to Gemini with Daily Brief & Gemini Spark
- Gemini Omni & 3.5 Flash models
- and more!
Catch up on everything here 🧵

AI Verification Tools and SynthID

Google has pioneered a type of digital watermark that’s invisible to humans, but can reliably identify files that were generated by AI. That watermark is called SynthID.

Google Gemini wrote:

We recently added SynthID verification for image, video, and audio to the Gemini app. Just ask, "Is this made with AI?” or “Is this AI generated?”

We’re also adding verification for C2PA Content Credentials, to easily check if content is an unaltered original from a camera or if it has been modified, and by what tools. This feature is rolling out in the Gemini app starting today.

As more and more content is created with AI there is a growing need to verify what items were made by humans and which was generated by an LLM. To that end, a consortium of the largest players in the generative field has been formed around the SynthID protocol.

OpenAI wrote:

We’re adding new ways for people to identify AI-generated images and understand where they came from.

In addition to C2PA Content Credentials, images now also contain a SynthID watermark, and can be identified using a public verification tool to check whether an image was made by OpenAI products.

OpenAI has joined the steering committee of C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) and will begin using SynthID in their products. They have written a blog post about their decision to join the coalition and their hopes for this partnership. You can read it here.

Gemini Spark

Google Gemini wrote:

Gemini Spark is your new 24/7 personal AI agent.

Give it a task and it works autonomously in the background, even if your phone and laptop are turned off. You choose to turn it on and it's designed to check with you before taking major actions.

Gemini Omni

Google Gemini wrote:

Gemini Omni is coming to the Gemini app for paid subscribers today.

It lets you bring your ideas to life using any combination of text, images, and video inputs. Just open up Gemini, attach a video from your camera roll, and change it around. It’s that simple

Gemini Omni is different from other video editors in that you aren’t limited to text-only prompting. You can include text, images, and audio in your prompts. Ethan Mollick does a good job at showcasing how revolutionary this is in his tweet below.

Logan Kilpatrick wrote:

Introducing Gemini Omni 🔮........ Omni is our new model that can create anything from any input — starting with video (think Nano Banana but for video). Available in the Gemini App, Flow, and YouTube, with API support coming soon!

Ethan Mollick wrote:

I think people don't realize why Gemini Omni is different than other video AIs. It is fully multimodal, so it can edit video natively, too

I took the famous "train " movie from 1896 & made it a bullet train, LEGO, added a time traveler, a centipede, muppets... (see reflections?)

[Click the image for video]

Pope Leo Issues Encyclical Letter Regarding AI

The Pope has issued guidance related to the use of AI. I’m still going through the document, but I wanted to highlight a couple of interesting passages. The full text of the Pope’s letter can be read here.

The last sentence in the image above “…it is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback…” is a beautifully concise way to describe AI. It’s also a type of litmus test that reveals how deeply someone understands these tools. I am by no means an expert, but the pattern I have noticed is that the more advanced someone is with AI tool use the more willing they are to push back on statements and answers the model has provided. That pushback frequently leads to better and more focused answers because it forces the model out of the averaged statistical response and into the exact area that you are exploring.

The Pope’s statements about accountability reminded me of a page from an IBM training manual from 1979.

This does seem to indicate that there is a hard limit to the number of jobs that can be relegated to AI because at the end of the day, you will always need a human who can be held responsible for its recommendations… well, in theory, anyway. We’ll have to see if reality lives up to that ideal.

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