Google Cloud Next is an AI conference now

May went out with a tech boom: Both prices and rockets exploded this week

It was explosive news week – if you're the price of a popular-but-aging piece of consumer gaming hardware or a Jeff Bezos rocket.  This week on The Kettle, Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by Reg reporters Richard Speed [https://www.theregister.com/author/richard-speed] and Dan Robinson [https://www.theregister.com/author/dan-robinson] to talk about the Steam Deck's 40+ percent price hike [https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/05/28/steam-deck-prices-go-through-the-roof-as-valve-blames-component-shortages/5247830] and what it means for the ongoing memory-and-storage shortage [https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2026/03/30/us-pc-shipments-to-fall-13-as-memory-costs-surge/5220533]. Sure, it's just consumer hardware, but it's the latest in a line of price hikes justified in the name of AI and geopolitics – and it could spell the beginning of a new normal for hardware prices.  We couldn't ignore the standout story of late last week, though, as a Blue Origin rocket blew up spectacularly [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O90WZJALYc] in what may be the largest space industry explosion in more than 50 years. The Blue Origin blowup is likely to delay the Artemis mission for months, if not a year or more.

Google's AI ventures are enshittification in action

Google I/O has ostensibly been an AI show for a few years running, but this year's announcements have taken the cake, which Google seems all to happy to let its users eat as it reshapes the web.  On this week's episode of The Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by El Reg senior reporter Tom Claburn and open source reporter Liam Proven to discuss how Google's bevy of AI announcements, and declaration that we're entering the era of AI search, might not play well with customers.  From an enlarged AI mode, to AI ads stuffed into AI answers, and pushing AI devs onto closed-source tools after shuttering open-source ones, Google is leaning hard into its version of the future of the internet no matter what users might think, and we wonder whether that might finally crack Google's stranglehold on the web.

Did your cloud AI bills go through the roof, too?

Hopefully you haven't had reason to notice yet, but there's a rising problem with AI services on Google Cloud, AWS, and other platforms sticking their customers with bills in the tens of thousands of dollars.  This week's episode of the Kettle focuses on two such stories that The Register published this week, one concerning [https://www.theregister.com/ai-ml/2026/05/13/google-users-fight-for-refunds-as-unauthorized-api-usage-bills-soar/5239160] Google and another [https://www.theregister.com/saas/2026/05/14/bedrock-and-a-hard-place-claude-adventure-leaves-aws-user-staring-down-30k-invoice/5238153] involving AWS. In both cases cloud customers using AI incurred massive bills without any prior notification from their provider and not a lot of help to resolve the matter with any sense of urgency.  Tune in to this week's episode to hear host Brandon Vigliarolo chat with O'Ryan Johnson and Richard Speed chat about their stories, what's causing these massive bills, and how you can avoid a similar situation at your own organization.

Locally-installed AI models are getting pretty good

This week on The Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo is joined by systems editor Tobias Mann and senior reporter Tom Claburn to discuss the current state of locally-installed coding assistant LLMs. After some experimentation, both Claburn and Mann have concluded they're actually getting pretty good. What does that mean for the computing power crunch? Hopefully it means cash-strapped developers will be able to get off the train of increased prices from AI vendors and actually run a useful local code assistant - just don't expect to give up on the big guys entirely - you might still need them to okay that smaller AI's work.

Things are messy at Microsoft: What's wrong?

Windows is a mess, Copilot's been a disaster, updates have been failing ... hey, Microsoft - everything okay? There's been a lot going wrong for the Windows maker of late, and leadership is promising improvements. Join host and El Reg Brandon Vigliarolo, US editor Avram Piltch, and Microsoft reporter Richard Speed to pick apart the situation and read the entrails to see what Microsoft's future holds.