---
title: "The Morning Brief — May 24, 2026"
date: 2026-05-24T00:00:02-05:00
draft: false
description: "Google's anything-to-anything AI model stuns, Demis Hassabis says we're near the singularity, xAI burns gas instead of solar, and OpenAI lands a Gartner crown — Sunday's AI landscape is anything but quiet."
tags: ["Morning Brief", "AI", "artificial intelligence", "tech news"]
---

## [Google's new anything-to-anything AI model is wild](https://www.theverge.com/tech/936507/gemini-omni-hands-on-deepfake-ai-video)

Google's Gemini Omni can take any input — text, image, video, audio — and generate any output, which sounds like a dry technical milestone until you actually see it in action. This is the kind of capability jump that moves AI from "impressive demo" to "genuinely disorienting tool," and the fact that it's landing inside a product ecosystem that billions of people already use makes it matter more than most lab announcements. Google had a big I/O week, and this is the headline that keeps giving.

---

## [Google I/O showed how the path for AI-driven science is shifting](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/22/1137813/google-i-o-showed-how-the-path-for-ai-science-is-shifting/)

DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis dropped a casual bombshell at I/O, saying we're currently "standing in the foothills of the singularity" — which is either the most consequential thing said at a developer conference this year or peak conference hype, and I'm genuinely not sure which. What's more grounded and interesting is MIT Tech Review's analysis of how AI is actually reshaping scientific discovery pipelines, from drug design to materials science. Hassabis has earned the right to make big claims; it's worth taking this one seriously even if the framing makes you wince.

---

## [Google just redesigned the search box for the first time in 25 years — here's why it matters more than you think](https://venturebeat.com/technology/google-just-redesigned-the-search-box-for-the-first-time-in-25-years-heres-why-it-matters-more-than-you-think)

A white rectangle with a blinking cursor has been the internet's front door for a quarter century, and Google just renovated the whole entryway. This isn't a cosmetic refresh — it's a signal that the query-and-links paradigm is being formally retired in favor of something more conversational and multimodal. When the company that *invented* modern search decides the search box itself is obsolete, that's not a product update, it's a eulogy.

---

## [Elon Musk has given up on solar power (on Earth)](https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/23/elon-musk-has-given-up-on-solar-power-on-earth/)

The man who once promised a "solar-electric economy" now has xAI running on natural gas and SpaceX dreaming of orbital data centers. To be fair, training frontier AI models requires staggering amounts of power and you need it *now*, not when the solar panels get permitted — but it's a remarkable pivot from the person who built a solar roof company. Turns out the fastest path to AGI runs through a gas turbine, apparently.

---

## [OpenAI named a Leader in enterprise coding agents by Gartner](https://openai.com/index/gartner-2026-agentic-coding-leader)

Gartner's Magic Quadrant is the enterprise world's version of a participation trophy that somehow still moves procurement decisions, and OpenAI has landed in the Leaders box for AI coding agents. Codex is now being used by companies like Virgin Atlantic to ship mobile apps under hard deadlines, which is a more convincing endorsement than any analyst report. The coding agent race is where the real enterprise money flows, and OpenAI is making sure it owns that conversation.

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## [AdventHealth advances whole-person care with OpenAI](https://openai.com/index/adventhealth)

Healthcare's AI adoption story is quietly becoming one of the more consequential deployments happening right now — AdventHealth is using ChatGPT for Healthcare to cut administrative load and give clinicians more time with patients. The promise of AI reducing the documentation burden that's burning out doctors has been talked about for years; case studies like this suggest it's actually starting to happen at scale. If AI earns its keep anywhere, it's probably here.

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## [A hacker group is poisoning open source code at an unprecedented scale](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/05/a-hacker-group-is-poisoning-open-source-code-at-an-unprecedented-scale/)

TeamPCP has been running a software supply chain attack spree that makes previous incidents look like dry runs, and GitHub is just the latest target. This matters enormously for AI specifically because the entire ecosystem — training pipelines, inference libraries, agent frameworks — runs on open source foundations that assume a baseline of trust. Poisoned dependencies are a nightmare scenario for AI security that doesn't get nearly enough airtime compared to the chatbot discourse.

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## [The Download: coding's future, and AI-driven science](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/22/1137845/the-download-coding-future-steroid-olympics-ai-science/)

Anthropic's Code with Claude event in London this week asked developers whether they'd shipped code written entirely by AI — and the answers apparently illustrated just how fast the floor is dropping out from under traditional software development. The future of coding isn't "AI helps you write code"; it's increasingly "AI writes the code and humans review, direct, and take responsibility for it." Whether you find that exciting or alarming probably depends on whether you're a developer or a manager.

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## Bottom Line

We're in a week where Google redesigns the internet's front door, DeepMind's CEO invokes the singularity without irony, and the main AI security story is about poisoned open source — the optimists and the pessimists both have a lot of material to work with.