{"slug": "what-to-expect-from-google-this-week", "title": "What to expect from Google this week", "summary": "At Google's annual I/O developer conference this week, the company enters as a clear third place in the foundation model race, having fallen behind rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in AI coding capabilities. Google is expected to announce a major new coding release to address this gap, though experts doubt it will be transformative enough to reclaim the lead. Beyond coding, the conference will also highlight Google's strengths in AI for science and health, including the public release of its AI-powered Health Coach.", "body_md": "What to expect from Google this week\nThe company has fallen behind its closest competitors where it matters most. Can it catch up?\nThis story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.\nWhen Google opens its doors tomorrow for its annual developer conference, I/O, it will do so as a clear third place in the foundation model race. A year ago, at Google I/O 2025, the situation looked very different: The company was still riding high from the launch of Gemini 2.5 Pro that March, and distinguishing among the top-tier large language models often felt like a subjective splitting of hairs.\nBut a foundation model’s reputation these days rests largely on its coding capabilities, and for months Google’s coding tools have been outgunned by Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. Those systems are so dramatically superior to Google’s own offerings that the company has reportedly had to allow some engineers at DeepMind, its AI division, to use Claude for their work—lest they fall farther behind.\nSo when I arrive at the conference in Mountain View, California tomorrow, I’ll certainly be on the lookout for any efforts Google is making to claw its way back into frontrunner position. But I’m also eager to see new developments in areas where Google shapes the cutting edge, such as AI for science. The company’s moves there might receive less attention, but they will be no less consequential.\nHere are three things I’ll be paying particular attention to over the next two days.\nAn attempted coding comeback\nGoogle is taking its AI coding crisis seriously. According to reporting from The Information, there’s a new AI coding team at DeepMind. And the Los Angeles Times has reported that John Jumper, who shared a 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry with DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis for their work on the protein structure prediction software AlphaFold, is lending his talents to the efforts. I would be surprised if we don’t see a major new coding release at I/O, perhaps in the form of an update to the company’s Antigravity agentic coding platform.\nThat said, we shouldn’t expect anything transformative here. Googlers have access to models and products that are substantially ahead of those released to the public, yet they were still reportedly fighting over who got access to Claude Code last month. Unless the company has made astonishing progress since then, Google probably won’t make it back to the coding frontier in the next two days.\nScience and health\nCoding might be Google DeepMind’s weakness, but science is its conspicuous strength. It is the only frontier AI company to have earned a Nobel Prize. And as LLMs have come to dominate the AI-for-science landscape, Google has only solidified its lead. Last year, the company released multiple scientific AI tools, including the AI co-scientist, which formulates hypotheses and research plans in response to user questions and has been described as an “oracle” by one Stanford scientist, and AlphaEvolve, a system that iteratively discovers new solutions for mathematical and computational problems. If any new scientific tools are announced at I/O, they’ll be worth noting.\nI’ll also be paying close attention to any moves Google makes in health and medicine. Google is doing some of the best research out there on LLM-based health tools, but OpenAI has defined the health AI conversation since the release of ChatGPT Health in January. Google has announced that it will be making its AI-powered Health Coach publicly available tomorrow, but promotional material suggests that the tool is geared more toward providing advice on topics such as fitness and diet than to addressing users’ medical concerns. Is this another area where Google has fallen behind, or is the company exercising appropriate caution in a high-stakes domain?\nThe drama\nWhile Google fans congregate down in Mountain View, roughly 30 miles north in Oakland the Elon Musk v. Sam Altman trial will be wrapping up. The past few months have seen more than their fair share of AI CEO drama—before the trial, the animosity between Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei took center stage as Anthropic and OpenAI worked to negotiate deals with the US Department of Defense. But DeepMind’s Hassabis has, for the most part, steered clear of such drama. He effectively presents himself as a Nobel Prize-winning nerd, and if he has written screeds about any of his peers, they haven’t been leaked to the press or appeared in legal discovery.\nThat’s not to say that Google is controversy free. Last month, a group of 600 employees, many of whom work for DeepMind, sent a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai protesting an impending DoD deal. Google signed that deal the next day. Hassabis, Pichai, and all the other big names will surely do their best to skirt these and other touchy subjects while on stage, but controversies will worm their way in regardless. It will be interesting to see whether Google can maintain its veneer of neutrality.\nDeep Dive\nArtificial intelligence\nOpenAI is throwing everything into building a fully automated researcher\nAn exclusive conversation with OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, about his firm's new grand challenge and the future of AI.\nWant to understand the current state of AI? Check out these charts.\nAccording to Stanford’s 2026 AI Index, AI is sprinting, and we’re struggling to keep up.\n10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now\nMIT Technology Review's authoritative overview of the 10 technologies, emerging trends, bold ideas, and powerful movements in AI in 2026.\nMusk v. Altman week 1: Elon Musk says he was duped, warns AI could kill us all, and admits that xAI distills OpenAI’s models\nMusk kept his cool, and OpenAI’s lawyer bulldozed him with piercing questions about his motivations for suing the company.\nStay connected\nGet the latest updates from\nMIT Technology Review\nDiscover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-to-expect-from-google-this-week", "canonical_source": "https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/18/1137439/what-to-expect-from-google-this-week/", "published_at": "2026-05-18 17:35:43+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-18 18:01:10.836390+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "developer-tools", "research", "science"], "entities": ["Google", "DeepMind", "Anthropic", "OpenAI", "Claude Code", "Codex", "Gemini 2.5 Pro", "AlphaFold"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-to-expect-from-google-this-week", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-to-expect-from-google-this-week.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-to-expect-from-google-this-week.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-to-expect-from-google-this-week.jsonld"}}