Google Blog

For those wondering about the OS:

"We’re bringing together the best of Android, which comes with powerful apps on Google Play and a modern OS that’s designed for Intelligence, and ChromeOS, which comes with the world’s most popular browser."

https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/android/meet-googlebook/

Many have tried desk/laptop and phone integration before, but it never seems to work smoothly, which surprises me because it doesn't seem that hard, at least to run phone apps on the larger screen (with some icon modification, etc.); and it doesn't stick as a feature, which surprises me because I'd think almost anyone would want to easily integrate the two.

I wonder why this time will be different? Is there demand now? Does Google have some trick up their sleeve? Do they have a universal development platform that makes it easy to write apps for both platforms?

This is the pr on it [0]. It was linked on hn at the time too [1]

For all the shit Google deservedly gets they seem to be genuinely trying to implement good and privacy preserving solutions to a lot of these problems.

The issue of course is that there's essentially no way to do all this stuff with software and hardware the user actually controls themselves, so you end up with hard requirements that you use big tech as gatekeepers.

This is the slippery slope that IMO eventually ends the open web.

If you take that outcome as inevitable, which at this point I basically do given all the forces lined up to restrict access to information, I suppose Google is about the best steward you could hope for.

[0] https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-identity-verifications/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43863672

Plus this rot has extended to true search engines too. A recent Google blurb on new "AI" features of Google web search kicks of with the following misrep:

"The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind"

https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/search-io-2026/

And they are also perverting search results, if this is to be believed:

"The Google AI Mode recognizes search intent by understanding the meaning of a query made rather than relying entirely on keywords. The platform uses sophisticated AI models to determine what users are looking to accomplish and whether they need any information, comparisons, or final decisions. This way, Google provides more accurate search results."

https://bostoninstituteofanalytics.org/blog/latest-google-ai-mode-changing-seo-2026/

Speech itself was kind of fun: https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/stanford-commencement-speech-2026/

Pretty light hearted, and honestly considering that he's given a speech to an empty stadium before (as referenced in the first few sentences, I think he'll have handled it just fine.

> But people have also been giving me a lot of advice on what to say. Actually, it’s been the same advice, and it’s about what not to say. People thought it would be really difficult for me; it is the last two letters of my last name, after all.

Ha, chuckle-worthy. Of course he'd find it hard to not pitch AI.

The only thing I find surprising is no-one points out that Stanford is a truly elite education system: Some 2 in 5 of students enter disabled, but almost all of them end up successful over time.

If these hardened libraries were as good, we wouldn't have blog posts like this[1], from the android team last year.

> We adopted Rust for its security and are seeing a 1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density compared to Android’s C and C++ code

Maybe the android team could have gotten the same benefits by simply auditing and modernising their C++ code? I'm not convinced. Google has some amazing engineers. They've been using hardened standard library variants for a long time - much longer than they've been part of the C++ standard. If google is still getting large security benefits from adopting rust, I think the benefit in rust is real and Bjarne Stroustrup is wrong.

[1] https://blog.google/security/rust-in-android-move-fast-fix-things/

This article is a really good summary of current thinking on the “world model” conundrum that a lot of people are talking about, either directly or indirectly with respect to current day deployments of LLMs.

It synthesizes comments on “RL Environments” (https://ankitmaloo.com/rl-env/), “World Models” (https://ankitmaloo.com/world-models/) and the real reason that the “Google Game Arena” (https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-deepmind/kaggle-game-arena-updates/) is so important to powering LLMs. In a sense it also relates to the notion of “taste” (https://wangcong.org/2026-01-13-personal-taste-is-the-moat.html) and how / if it’s moat-worthiness can be eliminated by models.