Why Local AI Was the Real Winner of Google I/O 2026 (An Insider’s Take)

This is a submission for the Google I/O Writing Challenge There is nothing quite like the energy of Shoreline Amphitheatre in May. This year on May 19, sitting there surrounded by thousands of developers, I realized that the collective vibe has changed from LLMs to Agentic AI. This was my third time attending Google I/O in person. My first year felt like an overwhelming introduction to the raw capabilities of Generative AI. Second was dominated by the excitement to plug LLMs into software an...