Google I/O: AI for Everyone

Plus, Big Tech vs human workers

May 22, 2026

Welcome back! LinkedIn is cracking down on AI comments. The platform is limiting the visibility of spammy, “low-effort” comments that may be AI-generated. That’s after it started targeting “generic or repetitive” content earlier this year. So if you’ve been scrolling past “Great insights! 🔥” on every post, LinkedIn heard you. 

Do you think this will actually clean up our feeds? Hit reply with what you think.

— Matt, Catherine, and the Future Tools team

Codex Now Lives in Your Pocket

Last week, OpenAI shipped something I'm genuinely excited about: you can now use Codex from your phone.

It's in preview in the ChatGPT mobile app (iOS and Android, available on every plan, including Free), and here's the key point: your phone isn't running the code. It's a remote control. Codex keeps running on your Mac, laptop, or devbox, and your phone just lets you check in, steer it, and approve what it's doing from anywhere.

I've been using Codex more and more lately. If you saw my recent video on building my own wiki, that was all done inside Codex. So I tried connecting my phone to my Mac Studio, and here’s what happened:

  • Setup took about a minute—update Codex, scan a QR code, connect on the phone, done.

  • My phone immediately pulled up all the "second brain" chat sessions I'd already started on my computer.

  • I asked it "what videos have I recently added to my wiki?" and watched it inspect my vault and read the files straight off my hard drive—running live on both my computer and my phone at the same time.

My POV: This is the part that gets me. My wiki still lives entirely on my computer (all the files are on my own hard drive), but now I can reach into it remotely from my phone. And it's not just for knowledge management. If you're building something with Codex, you can kick off a task, go watch TV in another room, and just keep checking the progress from your phone. When it hits a question, you answer right there and it keeps going.

The whole "agent runs while you live your life and you check in when it needs you" workflow is finally real, and it fits in your pocket.

— Matt

Google I/O 2026: AI For Everyone

Via WIRED

Google I/O happened this week, and the theme was clear: AI baked into everything you already use. Here are the highlights ⤵️

  • Search Redesign: Google announced its biggest change to search in 25 years. The new search box is built for longer, more conversational queries. There’s also a new AI-powered suggestion system that goes beyond autocomplete.

  • Gmail Live: You can now ask your inbox questions out loud. Need your Airbnb door code? The time of your dentist appointment? Instead of typing keywords into search, just ask, and Gemini pulls the answer from your emails. It also handles follow-ups and understands context, so “field trip” and “trip” don’t get confused.

  • Google Pics: A new AI design app for Workspace powered by Nano Banana 2. Describe what you want (a birthday invitation, a social graphic) and Pics generates it. The interesting part: every element stays editable. You can click on something and leave a comment, like in Google Docs, or just change the text directly. 

  • Information Agents: These run in the background and monitor topics for you (flight prices, sneaker drops, breaking news, housing trends). When something relevant happens, you get a notification. It’s what Google Alerts should have been.

Why it matters: These aren’t enterprise features or niche developer tools. They’re consumer focused, embedded into apps billions of people already use. From search to gmail, this is AI for the masses.

Big Tech Is Laying Off Thousands to ‘Focus On AI’

Meta and Intuit both announced major layoffs this week for similar reasons: they need to redirect resources toward AI.

  • Meta: The company is cutting around 8,000 jobs—about 10% of its workforce. Another 7,000 employees will be reassigned to four new teams building AI tools and apps. Meta has been placing huge bets on AI while pulling back from the Metaverse that Zuckerberg touted as the company’s future in 2021.

  • Intuit: The TurboTax and QuickBooks maker is letting go of 3,000 employees, which is about 17% of its staff. CEO Sasan Goodarzi said in an internal memo that the layoffs are meant to “reduce complexity” and help the company focus on AI efforts. The company reported $4.65 billion in revenue last quarter, up 17% year over year.

The context: It’s only May, and the tech industry has already cut more than 100,000 jobs this year, per Statista. Tech layoffs are on track to outpace both 2024 and 2025. Amazon, Block, Cisco, Cloudflare, Microsoft, and Oracle have made similar cuts—all citing AI as the impetus.

The bigger picture: The companies building AI are also the ones cutting jobs because of it. Revenue and stock prices keep rising, while the people who made AI possible are now being told they’re no longer needed. Hmm 🤔

High-signal AI news discovery

Via Digg AI

Digg AI monitors what ~1,000 influential AI voices read and share, then uses algorithmic analysis to surface “rising” stories before they break. It’s a curated feed built for researchers, builders, and investors who want to spot important developments early.

How you can use it

  • Get a high-signal feed of AI news without the noise

  • Spot rising stories before they go mainstream

  • Save time on daily news monitoring

  • Track what influential voices are paying attention to

Pricing: Free

AI-powered product demos on autopilot

Via Saltfish

Saltfish captures a single click-through and automatically generates interactive demos, AI-narrated videos, sandbox replicas, and branded visuals you can embed across marketing, sales, and product channels.

How you can use it

  • Produce on-brand demo assets without heavy production

  • Personalize demos for ABM campaigns

  • Surface account engagement with built-in analytics

  • Keep demos current with automated AI updates

Pricing: Free and paid plans available

Jobs, announcements, and big ideas

  • OpenAI prepares to file confidential IPO paperwork in the coming weeks, per WSJ sources.

  • Trump postpones signing an executive order on AI to avoid shrinking US “lead” over China.

  • Spotify and Universal strike a deal greenlighting fan-made AI covers and remixes.

  • Anthropic adds 28 new security and compliance integrations to Claude, expanding its enterprise governance stack.

  • Cursor doubles usage limits for newly invited Teams plan users for one month, sweetening team rollouts.

  • Krea launches LoRA fine-tuning for Krea 2 in beta, opening custom-style training to creators.

  • An OpenAI model disproves a longstanding discrete geometry conjecture, the lab's first published math breakthrough.

Anthropic is raising prices…and people aren’t happy. Here’s the quick breakdown:

That’s a wrap! See you next week for more.