Category: google

Google has kicked its Gemini rollout into high gear over the past year, releasing the much-improved Gemini 2.5 family and cramming various flavors of the model into Search, Gmail, and just about everything else the company makes.

Now, Google’s increasingly unavoidable AI is getting an upgrade. Gemini 3 Pro is available in a limited form today, featuring more immersive, visual outputs and fewer lies, Google says. The company also says Gemini 3 sets a new high-water mark for vibe coding, and Google is announcing a new AI-first integrated development environment (IDE) called Antigravity, which is also available today.

The first member of the Gemini 3 family

Google says the release of Gemini 3 is yet another step toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). The new version of Google’s flagship AI model has expanded simulated reasoning abilities and shows improved understanding of text, images, and video. So far, testers like it—Google’s latest LLM is once again atop the LMArena leaderboard with an ELO score of 1,501, besting Gemini 2.5 Pro by 50 points.

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In recent months, Google has promised to inject generative AI into the online shopping experience, and now it’s following through. The previously announced shopping features of AI Mode search are rolling out, and Gemini will also worm its way into Google’s forgotten Duplex automated phone call tech. It’s all coming in time for the holidays to allegedly make your gifting more convenient and also conveniently ensure that Google gets a piece of the action.

At Google I/O in May, the company announced its intention to bring conversational shopping to AI Mode. According to Google, its enormous “Shopping Graph” or retailer data means its AI is uniquely positioned to deliver useful suggestions. In the coming weeks, users in the US will be able to ask AI Mode complex questions about what to buy, and it will deliver suggestions, guides, tables, and other generated content to help you decide. And since this is gen AI, it comes with the usual disclaimers about possible mistakes.

You’re probably wondering if there will be sponsored shopping content in these experiences, and that’s a big yes. Google says some of the content that appears in AI Mode will be ads, just like if you look up shopping results in a traditional search. Shopping features are also coming to the Gemini app, but Google says it won’t have sponsored content in the results for the time being.

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Meta’s chief AI scientist and Turing Award winner Yann LeCun plans to leave the company to launch his own startup focused on a different type of AI called “world models,” the Financial Times reported. The French-US scientist has reportedly told associates he will depart in the coming months and is already in early talks to raise funds for the new venture. The departure comes as CEO Mark Zuckerberg radically overhauled Meta’s AI operations after deciding the company had fallen behind rivals such as OpenAI and Google.

World models are hypothetical AI systems that some AI engineers expect to develop an internal “understanding” of the physical world by learning from video and spatial data rather than text alone. Unlike current large language models (such as the kind that power ChatGPT) that predict the next segment of data in a sequence, world models would ideally simulate cause-and-effect scenarios, understand physics, and enable machines to reason and plan more like animals do. LeCun has said this architecture could take a decade to fully develop.

While some AI experts believe that Transformer-based AI models—such as large language models, video synthesis models, and interactive world synthesis models—have emergently modeled physics or absorbed the structural rules of the physical world from training data examples, the evidence so far generally points to sophisticated pattern-matching rather than a base understanding of how the physical world actually works.

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Google’s current mission is to weave generative AI into as many products as it can, getting everyone accustomed to, and maybe even dependent on, working with confabulatory robots. That means it needs to feed the bots a lot of your data, and that’s getting easier with the company’s new Private AI Compute. Google claims its new secure cloud environment will power better AI experiences without sacrificing your privacy.

The pitch sounds a lot like Apple’s Private Cloud Compute. Google’s Private AI Compute runs on “one seamless Google stack” powered by the company’s custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). These chips have integrated secure elements, and the new system allows devices to connect directly to the protected space via an encrypted link.

Google’s TPUs rely on an AMD-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) that encrypts and isolates memory from the host. Theoretically, that means no one else—not even Google itself—can access your data. Google says independent analysis by NCC Group shows that Private AI Compute meets its strict privacy guidelines.

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We’re running out of ways to tell you that Google is releasing more generative AI features, but that’s what’s happening in Google Photos today. The Big G is finally making good on its promise to add its market-leading Nano Banana image-editing model to the app. The model powers a couple of features, and it’s not just for Google’s Android platform. Nano Banana edits are also coming to the iOS version of the app.

Nano Banana started making waves when it appeared earlier this year as an unbranded demo. You simply feed the model an image and tell it what edits you want to see. Google said Nano Banana was destined for the Photos app back in October, but it’s only now beginning the rollout. The Photos app already had conversational editing in the “Help Me Edit” feature, but it was running an older non-fruit model that produced inferior results. Nano Banana editing will produce AI slop, yes, but it’s better slop.

Google says the updated Help Me Edit feature has access to your private face groups, so you can use names in your instructions. For example, you could type “Remove Riley’s sunglasses,” and Nano Banana will identify Riley in the photo (assuming you have a person of that name saved) and make the edit without further instructions. You can also ask for more fantastical edits in Help Me Edit, changing the style of the image from top to bottom.

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