Month: March 2025

Google’s Gemini AI can now see your search history

Gemini can do more with your data if you let it.

Google is continuing its quest to get more people to use Gemini, and it's doing that by giving away even more AI computing. Today, Google is releasing a raft of improvements for the Gemini 2.0 models, and as part of that upgrade, some of the AI's most advanced features are now available to free users. You'll be able to use the improved Deep Research to get in-depth information on a topic, and Google's newest reasoning model can peruse your search history to improve its understanding of you as a person. What could go wrong?

Like most big AI players, Google has a number of different models available. Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental is the company's most capable multistep reasoning model, which can consider complex topics and gives you a window into its "thought" process. Google is adding a lot to this model in its latest round of updates, enabling a much larger 1-million-token context window, file uploads, and faster output. It also supports more Google apps with connections to Calendar, Notes, Tasks, and Photos.

With the aim of making Gemini more personal to you, Google is also plugging Flash Thinking Experimental into a new source of data: your search history. Google stresses that you have to opt in to this feature, and it can be disabled at any time. Gemini will even display a banner to remind you it's connected to your search history so you don't forget. If you grant access, the AI can allegedly understand you better and offer more relevant recommendations. It feels a bit strange to turn Gemini loose on such personal data, but Google already knows what you look up on the Internet. You're not giving up much more if you let the robot have a peek. This is apparently just the start of Google's efforts to personalize the AI.

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OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use

National security hinges on unfettered access to AI training data, OpenAI says.

OpenAI is hoping that Donald Trump's AI Action Plan, due out this July, will settle copyright debates by declaring AI training fair use—paving the way for AI companies' unfettered access to training data that OpenAI claims is critical to defeat China in the AI race.

Currently, courts are mulling whether AI training is fair use, as rights holders say that AI models trained on creative works threaten to replace them in markets and water down humanity's creative output overall.

OpenAI is just one AI company fighting with rights holders in several dozen lawsuits, arguing that AI transforms copyrighted works it trains on and alleging that AI outputs aren't substitutes for original works.

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Google is bringing every Android game to Windows in big gaming update

Google has big plans for gaming in 2025.

The annual Game Developers Conference is about to kick off, and even though Stadia is dead and buried, Google has a lot of plans for games. It's expanding tools that help PC developers bring premium games to Android, and games are heading in the other direction, too. The PC-based Play Games platform is expanding to bring every single Android game to Windows. Google doesn't have a firm timeline for all these changes, but 2025 will be an interesting year for the company's gaming efforts.

Google released the first beta of Google Play Games on PC back in 2022, allowing you to play Android games on a PC. It has chugged along quietly ever since, mostly because of the anemic and largely uninteresting game catalog. While there are hundreds of thousands of Android games, only a handful were made available in the PC client. That's changing in a big way now that Google is bringing over every Android game from Google Play.

Starting today, you'll see thousands of new games in Google Play Games on PC. Developers actually have to opt out if they don't want their games available on Windows machines via Google Play Games. Google says this is possible thanks to improved custom controls, making it easy to map keyboard and gamepad controls onto games that were designed for touchscreens (see below). The usability of these mapped controls will probably vary dramatically from game to game.

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AI coding assistant refuses to write code, tells user to learn programming instead

Cursor AI tells user, “I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work.”

On Saturday, a developer using Cursor AI for a racing game project hit an unexpected roadblock when the programming assistant abruptly refused to continue generating code, instead offering some unsolicited career advice.

According to a bug report on Cursor's official forum, after producing approximately 750 to 800 lines of code (what the user calls "locs"), the AI assistant halted work and delivered a refusal message: "I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. The code appears to be handling skid mark fade effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly."

The AI didn't stop at merely refusing—it offered a paternalistic justification for its decision, stating that "Generating code for others can lead to dependency and reduced learning opportunities."

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Microsoft’s new AI “Copilot for Gaming” struggles to justify its existence

We’re still a ways off from the conversational AI “partner” teased last year.

Last year, Microsoft showed off a pair of concept videos highlighting how "real-time conversations with your AI companion copilot" might one day provide personalized guidance and companionship while playing a solo game of Minecraft. Now, Microsoft is announcing that it will roll out "Copilot for Gaming" as an "ultimate gaming sidekick" that will be available via mobile app preview for Xbox Insiders starting in April.

Unfortunately, the current version of Microsoft's gaming "copilot" seems to fall well short of last year's demo, providing some bare-bones automation of functions that can mostly be achieved pretty easily today without the aid of AI. The new app feels less like a revolutionary new use case for conversational AI and more like a glorified, Xbox-branded version of Apple's Siri.

Wait, is that it?

Watching a short, livestreamed demo of the new Copilot for Gaming app, my reactions quickly shifted from "that's kind of neat" to "wait, is that it?" That process started from the very first moment, when a player asked, "I want to get back into Age of Empires... Can you install it?" Conversational installation prompts could be a bit more convenient than simply clicking the handful of buttons needed to start a game install without AI, but it's not the most exciting use case to lead off with.

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