Google debuts new AI models, personal AI agents in effort to keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic

Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Alphabet Inc., during the Google I/O Developers Conference in Mountain View, California, US, on Tuesday, May 19, 2026. David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Google is rolling out its latest version of Gemini and a new artificial intelligence model designed to simulate the physical world, as the search giant races to keep pace in model development while also providing more agentic services to its massive user base. The company made the announcements at its annual Google I/O developer conference on Tuesday, gaining an audience for new product debuts at a time when the market has been focused on the soaring valuations of OpenAI and Anthropic, which are both gearing up for IPOs as soon as this year. The centerpiece of Google's AI strategy is Gemini, its family of models and tools. The company is showcasing Gemini 3.5 Flash, a lighter-weight addition to its suite that offers cutting-edge capabilities at half, or in some cases close to one-third, the price of comparable frontier models, according to CEO Sundar Pichai . In a news briefing with reporters ahead of Tuesday's event, Pichai said Gemini 3.5 Flash is "remarkably fast." The company said 3.5 Flash will now be the default model for the Gemini app and AI mode in search globally. "You no longer have to trade quality for latency," Google said in a blog post. …