Google I/O shows us AI is useful 🚂

Welcome to AI Collision 💥,

In today’s collision between AI and our world:

The next train is…
Google search for the future
Project Astra

If that’s enough to get the AI searching for you, read on…

AI Collision 💥

My wife had been in the city the other day and was catching a train back.

I got a message at 12:17.

Jumping on train now the 12:17, can you pick us up?

The answer was, of course.

Except one little tricky part of that is we don’t really use the train much. So I had no idea what time the train would get into the station, and not really any clue as to what time I needed to leave to make sure she wasn’t standing there with our three-year-old growing increasingly frustrated because I’d promised to be there and wasn’t.

Now, you’d think it would be very easy to go to the public transport website and just find the arrival time for the 12:17 train.

You’d…think.

But alas this is not how government run services work now, is it.

No, no, no. For a start, it would only give me the trains that were leaving now, or leaving in the future. I couldn’t retrospectively go back and look at the trains that had departed earlier.

Then I tried to find the timetables on the site…which again was about three pages deep and then also very out of date.

I had an epiphony in that moment of increasing frustration at the sheer maze that was the government’s public transport website…

Ask ChatGPT.

I opened up ChatGPT, jumped onto “Voice Mode” and asked,

What time does the 12:17 train from the city get into [our station]?

It thought for around five or six seconds and then,

The 12:17 PM train departing the city on the [your station] line is scheduled to arrive at [your station] at approximately 1:14 PM. This journey takes about 57 minutes, which is typical for this route.

I’m never going to use the public transport site again.

Then during the week I saw a great post that gives some perspective as to what’s going on with AI right now.

It was something along the lines of…

We’ll look back at how stupid and crazy it was that we’d type a couple of words into a search bar, then get presented with 10 pages of blue links many of which were just ploys to get us to clik and get advertised to, and then once we’d gone through several sites to try and find ourselves for the information we were after, we’d have to think and synthesise it all, to reach an outcome.

When you think about it like that, yeah, search is/was stupid.

Even now, when I’m researching stocks, I rarely use Google search, or any other search. I ask AI, not for the answers, but to synthesise all the garbage and take me to the most important first instance sites where I can find the information myself.

Of course I’ve been around long enough to know that if I want a company filing I’ll go right to the LSE or SEC or the company investor relations page.

But when trying to narrow down an endless pool of information, AI is incredibly useful, time efficient and productive.

However it does leave the question what does the future look like for Google? without search how can they stay top of the game?

Well they are much more than just search now, and from Android operating system to consumer devices they’re certainly expanding their reach. But search? The good news (for Alphabet shareholders) is they know the writing is on the wall for search as we know it, and that’s why they’ve pumped huge resource into levelling up Gemini and now rolling out AI into far more functional and useful ways to find information.

Your toughest questions. Your deepest research. Your personalized shopping needs. Your just-save-me-time tasks. All you have to do is ask.

Welcome to the next chapter of Google Search. #GoogleIO pic.twitter.com/gZoejJoZM5
— Google (@Google) May 20, 2025

Last year we unveiled Project Astra on the #GoogleIO stage. See how it’s evolved since then — and what might be possible in the future. pic.twitter.com/ObMi7gFrrl
— Google (@Google) May 20, 2025

I think these two videos alone give some indication as to how Google stays top of the pile. And if I was a shareholder I’d be somewhat relieved to see that at Google I/O this week, their massive developer conference, they’ve actually pulled the proverbial finger out and made some major moves in AI.

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