I Was Wrong About Google AI

We cloned an $18 B startup in 20 minutes, Claude 4 just dropped, and OpenAI’s $6.5 B acquihire rewrites the talent game.

Author

Nathan Lands
May 23, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Welcome to Lore Brief, your weekly edge in the age of AI.

This issue is brought to you by Factory.

We Cloned an $18B Startup in Twenty Minutes

During a recorded demo for next week’s The Next Wave episode, Factory’s autonomous “droids” rebuilt a major SaaS product end-to-end, turning ticket specs into production-ready pull requests in roughly twenty minutes.

Why it matters

  • No context-switching Tickets flow straight to PRs

  • Faster incident response Root cause in minutes, not hours

  • Deep code search Queries span every repo, doc, and log

  • Unified workspace Jira, GitHub, and docs on one screen

Next steps

  • Catch the full breakdown with founder Matan Grinberg when the episode drops next week.

  • Factory has a big announcement coming. We’ll be sharing more very soon.

I Was Wrong About Google AI

I thought the AI race was OpenAI versus xAI, with Google playing perpetual catch-up. This week changed my mind completely.

For the last year, I'd written Google off as "the IBM of the 2020s". Brilliant research, but a commercial ship too slow to turn. Full of people more interested in yoga lattes and resting and vesting than actually working hard and accelerating AI.

Then I/O 2025 happened, and the company unloaded more genuinely transformative AI products in one keynote than most startups ship in a year.

What they shipped in one week: Gemini 2.5 Pro with "Deep Think" reasoning, Veo 3 text-to-video with dialogue-level audio sync, Flow for filmmakers and Imagen 4 at 2K resolution.

The culture shift is real. From my interviews with Logan Kilpatrick, the product lead for Google AI Studio, I could sense the internal tempo had changed dramatically. A close friend who used to work on AI at Google just visited I/O and caught up with the team—he came back telling me people are pulling 14-hour days and shipping on Saturdays.

Why this matters beyond Google: The AI race just shifted from a two-horse sprint to a four-way full sprint. OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic (Claude 4 dropped today and looks incredible), and now Google are all running at maximum velocity. Veo 3's video generation could reshape Hollywood. Every timeline I had for AI advancement just compressed.

Bottom line: Whatever disruption timeline you're planning for in your industry, cut it in half. The companies building AI-first strategies today—like Shopify and Duolingo—will own their markets tomorrow. Companies without an AI-first approach won't make it.

The Next Wave: Crunchbase’s CEO on AI-Powered Unicorn Hunting

This week we interviewed the CEO of Crunchbase and learned how with AI they’re helping VCs and job seekers discover which startups are on track to become billion dollar companies. → Watch | Listen

Things I’m Learning From

  • [Link] – Dan Shipper’s Claude 4 vibe check. The best overview of the good and bad of Anthropic’s Claude 4.

  • [Link] – v0, the best AI tool for quickly creating a landing page or app, has released their own AI model.

  • [Link] – OpenAI’s video about acquiring Jony Ive’s company io for $6.5B. Most inspiring tech video I’ve seen in years. Excited to see what they create.

That’s it for today. Forward to a colleague who wants to get ahead in the AI Age.

-Nathan
Connect → X | LinkedIn
Listen to The Next Wave → Apple | Spotify | YouTube

(Disclosure: I may own equity in companies mentioned in Lore Brief.)