Hey folks, Alex here, welcome back to ThursdAI!

And folks, after the last week was the calm before the storm, "The storm came, y'all" – that's an understatement. This wasn't just a storm; it was an AI hurricane, a category 5 of announcements that left us all reeling (in the best way possible!). From being on the ground at Google I/O to live-watching Anthropic drop Claude 4 during our show, it's been an absolute whirlwind.

This week was so packed, it felt like AI Christmas, with tech giants and open-source heroes alike showering us with gifts. We saw OpenAI play their classic pre-and-post-Google I/O chess game, Microsoft make some serious open-source moves, Google unleash an avalanche of updates, and Anthropic crash the party with Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet live stream in the middle of ThursdAI!

So buckle up, because we're about to try and unpack this glorious chaos. As always, we're here to help you collectively know, learn, and stay up to date, so you don't have to. Let's dive in! (TL;DR and links in the end)

Open Source LLMs Kicking Things Off

Even with the titans battling, the open-source community dropped some serious heat this week. It wasn't the main headline grabber, but the releases were significant!

Gemma 3n: Tiny But Mighty Matryoshka

First up, Google's Gemma 3n. This isn't just another small model; it's a "Nano-plus" preview, a 4-billion parameter MatFormer (Matryoshka Transformer – how cool is that name?) model designed for mobile-first multimodal applications. The really slick part? It has a nested 2-billion parameter sub-model that can run entirely on phones or Chromebooks.

Yam was particularly excited about this one, pointing out the innovative "model inside another model" design. The idea is you can use half the model, not depth-wise, but throughout the layers, for a smaller footprint without sacrificing too much. It accepts interleaved text, image, audio, and video, supports ASR and speech translation, and even ships with RAG and function-calling libraries for edge apps. With a 128K token window and responsible AI features baked in, Gemma 3n is looking like a powerful tool for on-device AI. Google claims it beats prior 4B mobile models on MMLU-Lite and MMMU-Mini. It's an early preview in Google AI Studio, but it definitely flies on mobile devices.

Mistral & AllHands Unleash Devstral 24B

Then we got a collaboration from Mistral and AllHands: Devstral, a 24-billion parameter, state-of-the-art open model focused on code. We've been waiting for Mistral to drop some open-source goodness, and this one didn't disappoint.Nisten was super hyped, noting it beats o3-Mini on SWE-bench verified – a tough benchmark! He called it "the first proper vibe coder that you can run on a 3090," which is a big deal for coders who want local power and privacy. This is a fantastic development for the open-source coding community.

The Pre-I/O Tremors: OpenAI & Microsoft Set the Stage

As we predicted, OpenAI couldn't resist dropping some news right before Google I/O.

OpenAI's Codex Returns as an Agent

OpenAI launched Codex – yes, that Codex, but reborn as an asynchronous coding agent. This isn't just a CLI tool anymore; it connects to GitHub, does pull requests, fixes bugs, and navigates your codebase. It's powered by a new coding model fine-tuned for large codebases and was SOTA on SWE Agent when it dropped. Funnily, the model is also called Codex, this time, Codex-1.

And this gives us a perfect opportunity to talk about the emerging categories I'm seeing among Code Generator agents and tools:

* IDE-based (Cursor, Windsurf): Live pair programming in your editor

* Vibe coding (Lovable, Bolt, v0): "Build me a UI" style tools for non-coders

* CLI tools (Claude Code, Codex-cli): Terminal-based assistants

* Async agents (Claude Code, Jules, Codex, GitHub Copilot agent, Devin): Work on your repos while you sleep, open pull requests for you to review, async

Codex (this new one) falls into category number 4, and with today's release, Cursor seems to also strive to get to category number 4 with background processing.

Microsoft BUILD: Open Source Copilot and Copilot Agent Mode

Then came Microsoft Build, their huge developer conference, with a flurry of announcements.The biggest one for me? GitHub Copilot's front-end code is now open source! The VS Code editor part was already open, but the Copilot integration itself wasn't. This is a massive move, likely a direct answer to the insane valuations of VS Code clones like Cursor. Now, you can theoretically clone GitHub Copilot with VS Code and swing for the fences.

GitHub Copilot also launched as an asynchronous coding assistant, very similar in function to OpenAI's Codex, allowing it to be assigned tasks and create/update PRs. This puts Copilot right into category 4 of code assistants, and with the native Github Integration, they may actually have a leg up in this race!

And if that wasn't enough, Microsoft is adding MCP (Model Context Protocol) support directly into the Windows OS. The implications of having the world's biggest operating system natively support this agentic protocol are huge.

Google I/O: An "Ultra" Event Indeed!

Then came Tuesday, and Google I/O. I was there in the thick of it, and folks, it was an absolute barrage. Google is shipping. The theme could have been "Ultra" for many reasons, as we'll see.

First off, the scale: Google reported a 49x increase in AI usage since last year's I/O, jumping from 9 trillion tokens processed to a mind-boggling 480 trillion tokens. That's a testament to their generous free tiers and the explosion of AI adoption.

Gemini 2.5 Pro & Flash: #1 and #2 LLMs on Arena

Gemini 2.5 Flash got an update and is now #2 on the LMArena leaderboard (with Gemini 2.5 Pro still holding #1). Both Pro and Flash gained some serious new capabilities:

* Deep Think mode: This enhanced reasoning mode is pushing Gemini's scores to new heights, hitting 84% on MMMU and topping LiveCodeBench. It's about giving the model more "time" to work through complex problems.

* Native Audio I/O: We're talking real-time TTS in 24 languages with two voices, and affective dialogue capabilities. This is the advanced voice mode we've been waiting for, now built-in.

* Project Mariner: Computer-use actions are being exposed via the Gemini API & Vertex AI for RPA partners. This started as a Chrome extension to control your browser and now seems to be a cloud-based API, allowing Gemini to use the web, not just browse it. This feels like Google teaching its AI to interact with the JavaScript-heavy web, much like they taught their crawlers years ago.

* Thought Summaries: Okay, here's one update I'm not a fan of. They've switched from raw thinking traces to "thought summaries" in the API. We want the actual traces! That's how we learn and debug.

* Thinking Budgets: Previously a Flash-only feature, token ceilings for controlling latency/cost now extend to Pro.

* Flash Upgrade: 20-30% fewer tokens, better reasoning/multimodal scores, and GA in early June.

Gemini Diffusion: Speed Demon for Code and Math

This one got Yam Peleg incredibly excited. Gemini Diffusion is a new approach, different from transformers, for super-speed editing of code and math tasks. We saw demos hitting 2000 tokens per second! While there might be limitations at longer contexts, its speed and infilling capabilities are seriously impressive for a research preview. This is the first diffusion model for text we've seen from the frontier labs, and it looks sick. Funny note, they had to slow down the demo video to actually show the diffusion process, because at 2000t/s - apps appear as though out of thin air!

The "Ultra" Tier and Jules, Google's Coding Agent

Remember the "Ultra event" jokes? Well, Google announced a Gemini Ultra tier for $250/month. This tops OpenAI's Pro plan and includes DeepThink access, a generous amount of VEO3 generation, YouTube Premium, and a whopping 30TB of storage. It feels geared towards creators and developers.

And speaking of developers, Google launched Jules (jules.google)! This is their asynchronous coding assistant (Category 4!). Like Codex and GitHub Copilot Agent, it connects to your GitHub, opens PRs, fixes bugs, and more. The big differentiator? It's currently free, which might make it the default for many. Another powerful agent joins the fray!

AI Mode in Search: GA and Enhanced

AI Mode in Google Search, which we've discussed on the show before with Robby Stein, is now in General Availability in the US. This is Google's answer to Perplexity and chat-based search.But they didn't stop there:

* Personalization: AI Mode can now connect to your Gmail and Docs (if you opt-in) for more personalized results.

* Deep Search: While AI Mode is fast, Deep Search offers more comprehensive research capabilities, digging through hundreds of sources, similar to other "deep research" tools. This will eventually be integrated, allowing you to escalate an AI Mode query for a deeper dive.

* Project Mariner Integration: AI Mode will be able to click into websites, check availability for tickets, etc., bridging the gap to an "agentic web."

I've had a chat with Robby during I/O and you can listen to that interview at the end of the podcast.

Veo3: The Undisputed Star of Google I/O

For me, and many others I spoke to, Veo3 was the highlight