Google Labs just launched Mixboard, an experimental canvas tool designed for visual ideation. Powered by a new image editing model dubbed Nano Banana, it lets users tweak images with natural language prompts, remix visuals, and generate text based on board context. It turns static moodboards into an interactive AI workspace, currently in public beta for U.S. users.
Google just expanded its budget-friendly Google AI Plus subscription to 40 additional countries following an initial launch in Indonesia. The tier includes higher limits for image editing, access to the Veo 3 Fast video model across Gemini, Whisk, and Flow, 200 GB of storage, and Gemini inside Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. Why it matters: Google is making its creative and productivity tools accessible at a lower price point across dozens of developing markets.
Google just expanded AI Mode in Search globally to Spanish-speaking users. The update lets millions more people ask complex questions in Spanish and get direct answers backed by web links to dig deeper. It is another big push to take Google's most powerful AI search capabilities well beyond English.
Google just rolled out its conversational photo editing feature to eligible Android devices across the U.S. Previously exclusive to the Pixel 10, the Gemini-powered tool lets you tap “Help me edit” and simply describe your changes using voice or text instead of fiddling with sliders. Photo editing is officially entering the natural language era.
Google just brought Gemini to Google TV, turning big screens into conversational assistants that go way beyond basic voice commands. You can now chat through vague plot descriptions, catch up on past seasons, or learn new skills with matching YouTube videos. It's launching first in the US and Canada.
Scale AI just launched SEAL Showdown, an LLM benchmark designed to challenge LMArena with real-world user preferences. Sourced from contributors across 100+ countries on its Outlier platform, it lets users slice rankings by profession, age, and language. Currently, GPT-5 sweeps every category.
Google just announced its biggest Chrome upgrade yet, integrating Gemini directly across desktop and mobile. Users can now summarize multiple open tabs, recall past browsing via natural language, and search straight from the address bar, with autonomous agents for booking appointments coming soon. The rollout starts for U.S. desktop users in English.
Google just added the ability to share custom Gems in the Gemini app. The workflow mirrors Google Drive, letting you set view or edit permissions on your customized bots so coworkers, friends, or family can use them directly.
Google's NotebookLM just completed the 100% rollout of its Flashcards and Quizzes features to all users worldwide. The update turns your uploaded notes and documents into instant study aids and practice tests, making the AI notebook an even sharper tool for cramming or learning a new language.
Google just started rolling out its Ask Gemini assistant to select Workspace users on Google Meet. The AI can recap what you missed if you join late, summarize specific speakers, and pull action items using live captions and shared Docs. It's private to each user and desktop-only for English calls, saving you from awkward recaps.
Google just partnered with StopNCII.org to proactively block non-consensual intimate imagery across Search. Instead of forcing victims to manually request takedowns for every leak, Google will use image and video hashes to automatically detect and purge matching abusive content over the coming months.
Google DeepMind just proved its AI can beat almost all elite college coders under tournament conditions. Competing remotely in the 2025 ICPC World Finals, an advanced version of Gemini 2.5 Deep Think solved 10 of 12 problems in 5 hours, ranking second overall and cracking one problem no human team solved. Why it matters: competitive coding requires real reasoning and novel synthesis, proving AI is moving far beyond mere pattern matching.
Google just dropped 10 "AI Policy Gold Standards" designed to help emerging economies scale infrastructure, train workers, and deploy AI responsibly. The recommendations urge governments to adopt cloud-first mandates, open public datasets for model training, and lean on international risk standards rather than rushing into fragmented domestic red tape.
Penske Media, the publisher behind Rolling Stone and Variety, just sued Google for antitrust abuse over AI Overviews. The lawsuit claims Google forces publishers to feed its AI summaries, directly cannibalizing referral traffic and ad revenue with no opt-out short of leaving search entirely. Google fired back, calling the claims meritless.
Alek Safar just introduced ClockBench to test multimodal models on analog clocks, and they struggled hard. While humans achieved 89.1% accuracy, the best model, Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro, only hit 13.3% with a median error of an hour. Interestingly, models solve time math easily once they get the time right, proving visual spatial reasoning remains the real bottleneck.
Google Gemini just claimed the top free spot on the US Apple App Store, overtaking ChatGPT. The surge is largely driven by its viral Nano Banana image editor, known for strong character consistency, which drove 23 million new installs and over 500 million edits in two weeks. Free users get up to 100 edits daily.
Google and DeepMind just open-sourced VaultGemma, a 1B-parameter model trained from scratch with differential privacy. By mathematically injecting noise into training, it ensures the model never memorizes sensitive sequences. While privacy constraints pull its benchmark performance back to roughly GPT-2 levels, it provides the first empirical scaling laws for provably private AI.
Google just launched AI Max for Search campaigns in beta to all advertisers globally, offering a one-click setup to optimize search ads using Google AI. The update brings built-in one-click A/B testing across Google Ads platforms and APIs, with custom brand-safety text guidelines rolling out later this fall.
Google Research just teamed up with Stanford to launch AI Quests, an immersive game designed to teach 11- to 14-year-olds how AI tackles real-world challenges. The first quest has students collect rainfall data and train models to forecast floods, with upcoming missions exploring eye disease and brain mapping. Why it matters: It turns complex AI principles into hands-on play with ready-made curriculum for teachers.
Geoffrey Hinton just warned that tech CEOs are deluding themselves about AI's rosy future. In an interview with the FT, the Nobel laureate said the wealthy will inevitably use AI to replace workers, creating massive joblessness and ballooning profits that a universal basic income cannot fix. He also bet that superintelligence will arrive within 5 to 20 years.
