I am sitting in the sweltering Nevada heat watching a man struggle to lift a bar over his head. If the man manages to do it, he will win $250,000.

The man is Boady Santavy — a two-time Olympic weight-lifting contestant from Canada — and he has muscles that look culled from the Marvel Cinematic Universe: massive, cartoonish arms that might as well belong to a superhero rather than a real human.

Santavy is attempting to beat the world record for the men’s snatch — a lift of 183 kilograms, or approximately 403 pounds. After a tortured few seconds, Santavy drops the bar — an official “no lift” — and, with a look of animated dismay on his face, hobbles away, visibly cursing.

Santavy is one of a small horde of 42 athletic contestants — weight lifters, swimmers, and track runners — that have gathered in Las Vegas over Memorial Day weekend to compete in the Enhanced Games, a unique (and, by now, quite notorious) athletic competition in which almost all of the participating athletes are on performance enhancing drugs.

Broadly derided by critics as the “steroid Olympics,” the games have taken the deeply unprecedented step of juicing many of their athletes to the gills — anabolics, testosterone, peptides, human growth hormones, and more are all in circulation. All of that chemical enhancement has taken place under the watchful eye of a team of medical professionals. Indeed, the competitors — a hodgepodge of athletes from different ages, skill levels, and backgrounds — spent 12 weeks in the United Arab Emirates at an elite compound, where they trained for the weekend’s event while working closely with doctors who tailored their “protocols” — or drug cocktails — to their individual needs.

The athletes are also being paid “appearance fees” just to participate in the contest and, like Santavy, any competitor who happens to break a world record or place first during their competitive feats will be gifted extra cash — up to $1 million in the case of the 100 meter sprint and 50 meter freestyle.

In other words: Enhanced has taken the rulebook for professional athletic competition and aggressively spiraled it out the window.

Why am I, a technology journalist, covering this event?

Odd as it might seem for a place associated with weak-limbed nerds, Silicon Valley is largely to blame for Enhanced. Indeed, the bizarre spectacle is the work of a former startup that was founded by veterans of crypto, AI, and biotech firms, and that has been backed by the likes of mega-investor Peter Thiel and former Coinbase executive Balaji Srinivasan. The event is also at the forefront of a growing industry that Silicon Valley has embraced with open arms — that of human enhancement, in which injectable drugs and ingestible supplements serve as a source of both physical empowerment and good business.

Traditional athletic health organizations, of course, hate it. The World Anti-Doping Agency — the regulatory body for the Olympics — has called the Enhanced Games “dangerous,” and Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, describes it as a “clown show that puts profit over people.”

Steroids have long been viewed warily by the international health community, and even federally approved consumer drugs have stirred some concern among health professionals.

However, Enhanced’s organizers argue that they are actually the good guys — that they are trying to fix a persistent bug in organized sports that has existed since forever. That bug is that a whole lot of athletes are already doping — they’re just doing it secretly. The secrecy increases risk, as there may be limited medical oversight of how the athletes are using them. Conversely, in the Enhanced version of sport, athletes self-admittedly do the drugs under the careful supervision of a team of medical professionals.

If Enhanced were merely trying to improve sports safety, that would be one thing. But the truth is that it isn’t just an athletic competition — it’s also a business. The games are the work of Enhanced Group, Inc., a newly public company that enjoyed an IPO earlier this month at a $1.2 billion valuation. Enhanced sells personalized health treatments, including peptides, GLP-1s for weight loss, testosterone injections, and other physically “enhancing” drugs. The company also recently partnered with an AI company, Rezolve Ai, to launch a digital telehealth platform.

Enhanced wants to take what it’s done in Vegas and transform it into a global business: a distribution network for consumers looking to bulk up and make themselves more youthful. The drugs that Enhanced sells have been cleared by the FDA, but there is some concern that by normalizing steroid use, the company could have a trickle-down effect on the wider culture, leading some consumers (notably young ones) to seek less regulated, more dangerous compounds that could end up having disastrous results. This concern hangs over Enhanced’s athletic competition, which has largely been read as a big advertisement for its own business — as well as the peptide industry itself.

One nation, under peptides

I am one of some 200 journalists from around the world who touch down in Vegas two days prior to the games. Enhanced, which provides us with a dedicated workspace, regular meals, and press time with athletes and Enhanced executives, is exceedingly nice to us but one can’t escape the nagging suspicion that it’s because we are an integral part of their business plan. As the skeptical oglers of this Barnum & Bailey-esque curiosity, our job is to report back to the masses, who will then know of its existence. In other words, we are free marketing for Enhanced’s business.

That business is part of an industry that is due for a gold-rush-like boom later this year, should a certain deregulatory deliverance occur.

In February, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went on The Joe Rogan Experience and said he was a “big fan” of peptides. Kennedy (who, himself, can look enhanced at times) also implied that he planned to encourage the FDA to make some peptides more accessible to the public. Kennedy appears to have made good on that promise because, in July, the FDA will convene a pharmaceutical advisory committee that considers whether restrictions on certain previously banned peptides will be loosened.

Since then, the peptide industry has stood at a bizarre crossroads, in which some startups are reportedly conjuring products based on chemicals that currently reside in a legal “gray” zone, in the hopes of being first-to-market if and when the government eases up on them. Others are sticking to only FDA-approved products. A hot spot of this frenzy has been Silicon Valley, where techies are both using and investing in peptides with mutually aggressive gusto. Companies like Superpower, an AI longevity startup that sells FDA-approved peptides, and Noho Labs, a peptide startup backed by Elad Gil, have risen in prominence, while elite clubs like the AGI House have begun hosting peptide injecting “parties” — as personal use among the valley’s elite booms.

But peptides aren’t just gaining steam in the Bay Area; they’re also seeing a groundswell of use throughout the country, as fitness culture sees an aggressive upswing. Recent reports show that teens and twenty-somethings are turning to peptides to “looksmax” — the trendy new term that denotes any extreme effort to beautify one’s self — while the gym is increasingly seen as one of the key hubs of cultural life for young people. This country-wide push for self-improvement has been fueled by a social media landscape that champions the superficial. The progenitor of “looksmaxxing,” the 20-year-old online influencer “Clavicular,” has been a prominent, not to mention controversial, figure in the popularization of peptides. Yet he is only one in a sea of online voices, including podcasters like Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman, who have recently promoted or platformed the topic.

This is all about “health,” right?

Peptide producers — including the executives at Enhanced — have sworn that their primary concern is consumer “health.” At the same time, they don’t seem to mind admitting that they’re also interested in money.

Maximilian Martin, the 29-year-old CEO and co-founder of Enhanced, is a calm defender of his company’s unconventional practices. Martin, who previously founded a bitcoin mining company and is always impeccably dressed in a suit and has an affable salesman’s smile, meets with journalists for a press conference on Saturday, where he answers questions with an even-keeled good nature, speaking soberly about how his company plans to monetize the creation of a new generation of chemically-altered mutants.

Appropriately, X-Men comes up.

“People have been using performance enhancements for a long time. If you look at, for example, Hollywood, and you look at Marvel superheroes, they’re all enhanced,” Martin offers. “Like Hugh Jackman doesn’t look like he looks at his age because he has such a clean diet and sleeps eight hours a night, right? So that market is already there. The peptide market in the U.S. today is already 85 million people. Most of that market is served by unsupervised, unregulated substances that people are taking. What we’re doing is we’re entering that market with a pathway for people to get to those benefits that they’re looking for in a safe and medically supervised way.”

Christian Angermayer, Enhanced’s billionaire co-founder and executive chairman, is more succinct. “I’m a capitalist,” he tells journalists bluntly. He doesn’t see a disconnect between profits and health. “There is no reason why something that is good should not also be a business.”

Let the games begin

May 24th, the actual day of the games, is a sweltering blur of events — all of which take place inside a miraculous $50 million open-air stadium that has been constructed in a matter of weeks for the express purpose of hosting the games. The complex houses a track, swimming pools, and an expansive pavilion for the weightlifters. Surrounding risers are filled with an audience that cheers enthusiastically despite the hot sun.

Yet while the scene may superficially call to mind the Olympics, the vibe is much less a serious sporting event than it is an uncomfortable cocktail of America’s Got Talent, WWE, and Gladiator. Beautiful influencers fill the stands in youthful, colorful herds, and an announcer narrates the day’s events with a sonorous boom that makes it feel vaguely like we’re all sitting court side at WrestleMania. Later in the evening, The Killers — a staple of Vegas entertainment culture — will play a brief concert to close out the games.

The athletes, meanwhile, stalk the grounds like mythical titans, their bulking, unreal muscles glistening in the sunlight.

Martin is seen throughout the day, walking to and fro in his impeccable suit. This suit becomes progressively more wet throughout the evening, as he keeps rushing down to the pool to hug the swimmers who win their races. Angermayer glides about the event with a breezy energy, a tranquil smile affixed to his face. He drops by the press tent briefly to glad-hand.

Other staples of the tech industry — like Bryan Johnson, the mega-wealthy biohacker who plans to live forever — are also involved. Despite no known professional athletic achievements, Johnson spends the night commentating on the spectacle in a Charles-Barkley-esque, retired athlete kind of way. Later he and his girlfriend (whose vagina Johnson regularly tweets about) are seen walking past the media tent; Johnson is dressed in a bizarre outfit that makes him look a little bit like the Sleepytime Bear from Celestial Seasonings.

The actual competitions are thrilling enough — and, in general, there seem to be a couple categories of athletes that have come to compete.

There are people like James Magnussen, a retired swimmer from Australia who has won Olympic medals in the past and sees the games as an opportunity to get back in on the action. Magnussen, an image of whose massive body spread virally throughout the web earlier this year, has spoken supportively of the peptide industry, and once said that the combination of peptides and testosterone made him feel like he was “18 again.” He will fail to break any records, however, and places last in two races.

Then there are people like Hafthor “Thor” Bjornsson — a massive Nordic body builder and competitive weight-lifter who has self-admittedly done a lot of steroids in the past and sees this competition as an opportunity to do them under closer, safer supervision.

Bjornsson is recognizable to many because he starred in Game of Thrones as Ser Gregor Clegane, the brutal knight who does the dirty work of the Lannister family and whose go-to fight move is to crush his opponents’ skulls with his bare hands. (On press day, a female journalist asks Bjornsson if he will crush her skull, and he politely obliges with a pantomimed head combustion.) During the games, Bjornsson thrillingly attempts a world record deadlift of 1,135.4 pounds, but ultimately fails to muster the strength.

Finally, there are a few competitors like American swimmer Hunter Armstrong, who are abstaining from any supplemental intake altogether. Why is Armstrong even competing? It’s pretty simple: the money, Armstrong tells journalists. That’s the answer that a lot of athletes have given for their participation, in fact. Armstrong has Olympic ambitions and wants to keep himself in the running by not tainting his record. He also has a personal aversion to doping.

“The Olympic movement is something that is very important to me,” Armstrong tells the journalists. “Outside of personal reasons, if I were to go into some kind of protocol I would lose that opportunity.”

Armstrong is one of several competitors who will win their races (in the swimmer’s case, the 50-meter backstroke) despite not being “enhanced.”

The day’s events unfold at a steady pace and, despite organizers’ promise of a titanic extravaganza of unlocked human potential, the event, while entertaining, largely pales in comparison to the Olympics or even, say, a really thrilling football game. The whole thing ends on a weirdly convenient high-point: the competition’s last race of the night — the men’s 50-meter swimming freestyle — culminates with Enhanced’s first and only world-record. Kristian Gkolomeev, a hulking colossus from Greece (he is six feet, eight inches tall), cuts across the pool at a breakneck 20.81 seconds, besting the previous record by 0.07 seconds. The entire crowd erupts in cheers and the venue’s lights blare red in a gameshow-style spasm of celebration. The other swimmers pump their fists in the air victoriously, and Martin again rushes the field in his suit, intent on hugging the dripping Gkolomeev.

The future is enhanced?

The critics of the Enhanced Games say it isn’t really about health, it’s about money. Yet it’s difficult to escape the sense that the games are also about something else, which is vanity — both that of America and the event’s organizers. America has always been the country where fitness culture extends beyond health into the realm of self-aggrandizement, and the Enhanced Games — a showy pageant embodying that principle — fits right in with the next big era of American self-regard. After all, the location of the event — the nation’s hedonism-fueled “Sin City” — hardly screams “health.” Las Vegas is the locale of spectacle and consumption — of barely-remembered nights in which revelers live for the moment, not the long-term. The organizers could have set the games in the symbolically purifying environs of the Swiss countryside or Joshua Tree, but instead they chose to set it in a place where people commonly risk their futures over a game of cards for a fleeting chance at glory.

Similarly, injecting yourself with drugs to make your muscles big doesn’t necessarily seem to be about long-term wellness as much as it’s about looking good in the moment — tomorrow’s potential health consequences be damned.

The glory for the event’s organizers, meanwhile, resides in their ability to usher in a new industry, commemorating it — as they have — with an extravagant ritual that, in their own words, heralds future “scientific breakthroughs” and “human advancement” (not to mention revenue). The gamble for them is on whether this industry does or does not blossom in the coming months, but like the consumers of their supplements, they appear to be living in the moment.

One place where limited glory is felt is the press corps towards the end of Enhanced’s three-day extravaganza. Around midnight, when the games are finally over and the crowd is dispersing, our hot and tired cohort retreats blearily to the media center — a florescent-lit workroom in the nearby Resorts World hotel. As I’m readying to leave, I make a pitstop to the bathroom and, after some necessary relief, turn a corner and run smack into Martin. He appears to be in a brand new suit (or perhaps the one he’s been wearing has simply dried), and he is admiring it in the bathroom mirror. He is undoubtedly preparing for the late-night press conference that’s scheduled to occur soon.

Having not actually spoken to him yet, I am at a bit of a conversational loss. What sort of patter can two men who are essentially strangers offer one another in a public bathroom late at night? How can I sum up the last 72 hours? “Congratulations,” my tired brain lands on, as I head for the door.

“Thank you,” he says, nodding briefly, then turns back to the mirror.

This week at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in Athens — part of the Panathenea festival taking place in the city — I sat down with Niko Bonatsos of Verdict Capital, Andreas Stavropoulos of Threshold Ventures, and Ben Blume of Atomico to ask about the current state of venture investing, the wave of mega-IPOs that SpaceX is about to kick off, and where they still see an ocean of opportunity. Our conversation, following, has been edited for length and clarity. You can check out the full discussion at page bottom.

With SpaceX reportedly eyeing a $1.75 trillion valuation at IPO, and OpenAI and Anthropic potentially not far behind, what will the impacts be on the broader market?

Andreas Stavropoulos: I remember how exciting the Google IPO was, and how it ushered in a reopening of a market that had been very pessimistic about tech in the early 2000s — how it was an enabling event that brought in a whole new generation of entrepreneurs. The same thing is happening now. With every subsequent wave of paradigm shifts, the scale changes by orders of magnitude, and that’s to be expected. What business today in the information age is not a technology business?

Ben Blume: These are phenomenal companies, and with each one of these scale liquidity events, they generate wealth and returns that go back into the next generation of companies.

Niko Bonatsos: My co-founder at Verdict was the first-ever investor in what is now known as Cursor. So if Elon feels like he’s [having] a good moment, maybe Cursor [which Musk revealed recently that he has the option to acquire for $60 billion] will have some good news too. But more broadly, for the next next generation of companies, as Andreas mentioned, they could be going after much larger markets, and immigrant founders, as we know, they’re the ones who dream really big, they have nothing to lose, and they can go the distance, and Elon Musk is an immigrant founder himself. So, for those of us who come from Greece or other smaller markets, wow, you know, that’s a great example.

Some have suggested SpaceX at that valuation could soak up so much public market capital that it hurts companies going out in its wake. Is that a real concern?

Stavropoulos: You can choose to see most things as optimistic or pessimistic and make very good arguments for both. Something like a SpaceX, macro-wise, is going to end up bringing more people into the market than the short-term impact of soaking up some liquidity. Consumer involvement in markets in the last 30 years has gone from something that wasn’t really a thing to something people trade on their phones every day. Those numbers add up.

Blume: SpaceX is such a one-of-one company. For a long time, space has been a government and public sector domain. To give investors real financial access to it — I think that’s going to capture a widespread imagination. It may mentally draw from longer-tail allocations that might otherwise have gone into the next 20 or 30 software businesses, but I think the interest it generates more than compensates.

Is the current flood of capital into AI justified by future earnings, or is this a case of extreme FOMO?

Bonatsos: If you’re an AI-native founder or a company in the American dynamism space right now, you can live life in the fast lane. If you’re not in one of those two buckets, it’s really tough. In 17 years in Silicon Valley, I’ve never seen more groupthink. Three quarters of all venture capital raised over the last year went into five companies. Today, if you’re a 40-year-old tenured professor at Stanford not building something in AI, no one wants to meet you.

That said, something real is changing. Two founders with today’s AI tools can make more progress in two months with one round of funding than they could a year ago with ten people, two rounds, and a full year of work. This is changing how companies get started and how they’ll capitalize themselves — potentially going straight from pre-seed to Series B.

Stavropoulos: There will be a correction that pushes some capital back out of the market. The promise and the optimism is still significantly ahead of the short- to medium-term ability to show results. But on a long-term, macro scale, I don’t think we’re being over-optimistic. The problem is that shouldn’t be mistaken for thinking every 19-year-old with an idea is the next big thing.

How do you actually price deals when things are moving this fast?

Blume: The best founders have no shortage of capital options. You have to think about what’s a meaningful ownership stake for your fund, and walk away when you can’t get there. The interesting dynamic is that we’re a $500 million fund looking at the same opportunities as people investing from a $10 or $15 billion fund. The incremental value of a dollar to us versus them is very different. That distorts round sizes and makes it difficult for offers to stack up like-for-like.

Bonatsos: We do first-money investing — basically instead of friends and family, instead of angels. We invest in what I’d call “freaks” — individuals where, like in professional sports, a few people break all the records. One day goes by and they learn and mature and make the progress that takes the average smart founder a whole week. Most of the founders we’ve backed so far are working on markets that don’t have a name yet — which is exactly why the valuations are low. Larger asset managers can’t tell their teams to go find companies in a market that doesn’t exist yet.

There’s a lot of talk about very young founders getting term sheets almost on arrival. Is age really a proxy for anything meaningful right now?

Stavropoulos: At times of disruption, when the world seems to be changing in some fundamental way, it especially favors lack of experience. Experience can actually steer you the wrong way. That doesn’t mean it’s changed forever — we’re going through a phase where things haven’t settled down yet, and that creates fertile ground for new ideas, and typically younger entrepreneurs. But I don’t want to over-generalize.

Bonatsos: The exact same thing was happening when I arrived as a grad student at Stanford in 2009. The iPhone was two years old, the App Store was one year old, and there were days when there were more VCs on campus than students. Today is one of those singular moments again. If you’re 22 years old in San Francisco and building something in AI, there may be a seed term sheet in your inbox — but if you’re 19, oh my God, this means you’re really good [laughs]; you might already have a Series A [offer]. And look, age is all relative at this point — I was talking to a founder here in Athens this week who’s 24, and when I said he wasn’t that young, I meant it: I met the Mercor kids when they were 19, and look where they are now.

Blume: If you try to generalize just from age, I think you miss what you’re actually looking for: an extremely high level of intensity, the ability to move ahead of the pace the market is moving, and the mental dexterity to adapt in a landscape that’s changing constantly. If you have those things, it’s more important than the age on the passport.

What do you make of shady behavior happening around metrics — particularly how companies are reporting ARR [annualized recurring revenue]?

Blume: People are being relatively liberal with how they define the A and the R and the R. New pricing models — token-based billing, free tokens being counted as revenue — create a lot of ways to express these numbers. Our job as investors is to cut through that and make decisions based on the actual truths. Is it fine from a marketing perspective? Probably. Is it fine for deciding which companies get capital? No. But sophisticated investors can generally cut through it.

Bonatsos: Sometimes I’ll get an email with a very high ARR number from a portfolio company I didn’t remember doing that well, so I’ll contact the founder. The answer? It was 365 times what they made the day before because a campaign hit. I told him, can you please use a quarterly basis at least? Whenever a lot of money is chasing specific themes, some people develop a grifting mentality for short-term gain.

In venture you can only lose your money once on a bad investment, but the right one can return 100x — so you write off the bad actors and move on.

For the aspiring founders in the audience, where do you actually see white space right now?

Bonatsos: Every VC firm used to have at least half its partners doing consumer internet investing. Today, maybe they have half a person — they’ve left the field altogether. But one of the best AI companies of the last few years, OpenAI, became massive because of ChatGPT. Consumer is coming back, which is almost a crazy statement. Those founders today have maybe five investors they can pitch for their first or second round. I think there’s also a new movement emerging that’s going to help restore the American dream through new consumer fintech ideas.

Blume: The opportunity of AI interacting with the physical world is orders of magnitude larger than what we’ve seen so far in workflow automation and digital process. The physical world still shapes a large part of the economy. The bet on robotics in all its forms — not just the humanoid doing a backflip — is still one of the biggest wide-open spaces over the next 10 years.

If you’re interested in learning more about what the three think — including about whether Stanford University has grown too cozy with the venture capital industry — you can check out the full conversation below:

Gemini Spark is Google’s new 24/7 agentic assistant, designed to help you help you “navigate your digital life,” which essentially means getting your online to-dos done, summarizing the things you don’t have time to read (like the entirety of your inbox), or organizing something that would have otherwise involved too much screen time-filled manual labor, like a personal expenses spreadsheet.

The service was first introduced at Google’s annual developer conference in May, where CEO Sundar Pichai joked that Spark, which runs on virtual machines in the cloud, means that “yes, you can close your laptop.” The in-joke here is that he’s comparing Spark to other agentic AI systems, like the ever-popular OpenClaw, which require keeping the machine awake to run its tasks.

Spark, he’s suggesting, is agentic AI for the rest of us — those who would rather get things done without nerding out about it by setting up an always-on AI machine.

In practice, Spark is still very much designed for work-adjacent tasks, given its integration with Google’s productivity apps like Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. (After all, how many times are you preparing a deck for in your personal life? Unless you’re a Gen Z creator explaining the latest meme to your chronically offline friends, that is?)

Google also struggles a bit to come up with real-world examples that would convince someone that Spark is a “must-have” rather than a “nice-to-have” tool for personal use.

Among its suggestions for “personal productivity” is using Spark to scan your emails and calendar for the day and send you a recap with your top three must-do tasks,” which already assumes you are a person who jots down your to-dos in a calendar or email app, instead of a notepad (virtual or otherwise), or just keeps a running list in your brain. (E.g., Grab prescriptions and shampoo at Walgreens. Buy more dog food. Hang out with friends on Saturday.)

Google also suggests you could use Spark as a weekend planner, by drafting a Google Doc “suggesting three free activities based on my open calendar blocks for the upcoming weekend,” which, again, assumes you are some sort of scheduling nerd in your offline life.

Nevertheless, with early access to Gemini Spark, I decided to put it through its paces, with what are perhaps some real-world suggestions of my own. I came away surprised that it was a fairly useful implementation of consumer AI, but not one that deserves to have its own brand.

Finding Savings

For one initial task, I asked Spark for help with a shopping-related research. The idea was to help me with an everyday local drugstore trip for household items, so I asked Spark for product suggestions based on weekly deals and coupons I could clip.

At first, Spark seemed to do pretty well here, as it told me exactly what products were on sale that matched my needs, and suggested coupons to clip in the Walgreens app for extra savings. It even suggested how I could stack coupons for one item by combining online promo codes, if I were placing an online pick-up order and was planning to spend more on personal care items.

However, as is often the case with AI, the devil was in the details, as one of the promo codes was invalid when I tried it, despite meeting what the AI said were the requirements. Still, Spark pointed me to some other savings — like buy-one-get-one-free and rewards deals that made up for this gaffe.

Planning a packing list for a day trip

In another test, I asked Gemini for help with a packing list for a day trip out of town. I asked it to check the weather, gather the event details, and make suggestions of what to bring with us, like sunscreen or water, to see what it would come up with, after it learned more about the activity. I asked for the final list to be imported into Google Keep.

Guess what Spark can’t do? Use Google Keep.

That’s a huge oversight, given that Google’s notetaking app would be essential for anything in the realm of personal productivity. Instead, it offered to make me a doc or draft me an email because, sure, that’s the sort of thing I’d want to check for my list of to-brings. (??)

In terms of the list itself, however, Spark was spot-on, suggesting lawn chairs or blankets, water, sunscreen, sunglasses, a light layer for when the sun goes down, a reusable shopping bag, and an umbrella for possible light showers that day. It also reminded me that dogs were not allowed, despite the event being outdoors. (Sorry, Princess!)

Summer Camp / Activity Suggestions

My child has aged out of summer camps for kids (and should probably just get a job), but before we went that route, I wanted to scour the local area to find out if there were any summer activities available for teens that she could do in addition to her engineering camp in June. I asked Spark to do a thorough search and find any and all suggestions, keeping in mind that we would not want to drive more than around 30 minutes.

Spark generated a decent list of ideas for activities that matched my child’s interests, and plotted out how far they were from home. Unfortunately, I forgot to prompt Spark to get the costs or dates of the programs, and it didn’t bother to tell me, which meant I still had to do more manual research on my own.

Recurring Task: Summarize newsletters from email

Like many, I subscribe to too many newsletters, so I put Spark to work on preparing me a weekly summary, which would arrive every Friday, focused only on the top five posts or articles I shouldn’t miss reading, along with a link.

The AI got to work, digging into my inbox and, within moments, had presented a summary of several interesting articles to read that included context and a link. (The link ended up being a Google.com redirect that didn’t work — I had to click the link displayed on the redirect page, as it never automatically sent me to the site in question.) While I generally liked the suggestions, Spark only returned four articles to read when I had requested five. Spark had interpreted the request as “4-5” for some reason.

Recurring Event: Suggest Weekend Activities

For another request, I asked Spark to compile a list of weekend activities around town for me on Fridays, so I can get to planning my weekend fun. As someone who lives in a smaller city, there aren’t always big events or things to do, so making sure you don’t miss the anticipated street festival or hot show when it comes to town is key. But there’s no single source to find everything there is to do — you have to read multiple local newsletters, visit websites and Facebook Groups, read the newspaper online, and more.

Spark instead set up a web search, combined (at my request) with a search of my Gmail for any relevant local newsletters, digests, or lists with keywords indicating a local activity suggestion. It then compiled a list of upcoming weekend events and noted that if I wanted to add any to my calendar, I could just reply.

If it wasn’t for Spark, I would have never known there is an Annual Beaver Queen Pageant nearby, which apparently features people in beaver costumes raising money for wetland conservation? OK, I might need to check that out. (You still have to tell Spark to add it, then click a button to confirm, but this is easier than the manual labor of reading through so many sources for ideas.)

Recurring Event: Check for Price Drops

For my last request, I set Gemini Spark to work on tracking price drops for an expensive eye cream. As a penny-pincher, I’d never buy it unless there was a crazy sale. I wanted Spark to keep track of the price changes for me and alert me if the eye cream ever became more affordable. However, Spark’s interpretation of this request was to simply recheck the price every two weeks to see if it dropped below my target. I’m not sure that would be frequent enough to spot a deal. (I’ll update if the results are successful, but I believe I’ve set too low a bar as my target — even after raising my bar by another $10! — so this is probably just wishful shopping at this point. But I’m always hopeful some online retailer will make a pricing mistake one day!)

More Ideas to Come

I can already see how I’ll be able to integrate Spark into my everyday life in other ways, too — I already have ideas for more email monitoring and cleanup tasks, for instance. The next time I change the home’s air filter, I’m going to ask Spark to remind me in three months to swap it out. If I ever get around to taking a vacation, I’ll probably have some tasks for it then, as well.

Room to improve

While Spark already performed fairly well on my tasks with only small quibbles, the biggest criticism I had was that there’s no need for this to be a standalone product with a different branding. I think that adds to consumer confusion in this day and age, where there are so many things happening in the AI space, and where every new model has its own name and number, and some of these are quite wild. (Nano Banana, anyone?)

Why not just pitch Spark as something Gemini can do out of the box, instead of making it its own product? Why does the toggle have to say “switch to Spark,” instead of just “switch to Tasks?” (If it even needs to have its own space in the user interface!) I personally don’t want to carry the mental load of trying to determine whether something is a question or a task; I just want to type in a question or request and be done with it.

I also think the lack of Keep integration is a major miss in terms of being helpful with your personal productivity. Google Docs is overkill for a packing list. And, unfortunately, for iPhone users, tapping into Gemini Spark directly from your device through a push of a hardware button or gesture won’t be possible — unless Apple announces this at next month’s WWDC? Instead, you’ll need to launch the Gemini app and use it from there. (Another issue with having Spark as its own toggle within Gemini — you can’t program the iPhone’s Activity Button to go directly to Spark, which is separate from Gemini’s chatbot interface. How great it would be if everything Gemini does were all in a single destination! Ugh!)

And while Spark will later be able to do more with MCP integrations, not being able to set it to perform certain tasks, like booking your favorite date night restaurant regularly through Resy or looking for flight deals on a preferred booking engine, for instance, makes Spark feel somewhat lacking for the time being, given that not everything you do online takes place in Google’s universe of services.

(Also, I’d really like to text Spark. I wish that were an option, too.)