Tootfinder

Epic v. Google: Epic and Google have a secret deal involving Unreal Engine, Fortnite, and Android, with Epic spending $800M over six years on Google services (The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/policy/866140/epic-google-fortnite-android-u…

Epic and Google have a secret $800 million Unreal Engine and services deal
Antitrust settlement talks have revealed a deal between Epic and Google over the Unreal Engine and unspecified services, which could impact the judge’s decision.

White House Doctored Photo With Google AI to Make It Look Like an Activist Was Sobbing During Perp Walk (Noah Hurowitz/The Intercept)
https://theintercept.com/2026/01/22/white-house-google-ai-photo-arrest-ice-minnesota/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260122/p156#a260122p156

The only flavour of decentralisation there’s no room for at FOSDEM is the kind that won’t speak at a conference that allows itself to be sponsored by, and thereby whitewashes, a surveillance capitalist like Google that is complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
ht…

Google says replacing some article headlines with AI-generated ones is now a feature in Discover, but they can be false or fail to highlight new, relevant info (Sean Hollister/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/865168/google-says-ai-news-he…

Google won’t stop replacing our news headlines with terrible AI
Google now says its AI news headlines are a feature, not an experiment — its ‘trending topics’ in Google Discover keep us from accurately marketing our journalism.

I just updated my reading guide, “Entry to Left-Wing Anarchist Reading” again!
I want it to be a curated path from beginner-friendly intros to deeper theory and real-world examples, enjoy!
Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Wu…

Every single day, the whole debacle with Blake Lemoine feels so much more quaint than the mass delusions we’re uncovering now. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/

The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
The chorus of technologists who believe AI models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder.

Google acquires Common Sense Machines, whose AI models create 3D assets from 2D images, and was last valued at $15M after raising $10M from a16z and others (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/exclusive-google-acquires-3d-im…

Exclusive: Google Acquires 3D Image Generator Startup
Google has acquired Common Sense Machines, a Cambridge, Mass.,-based startup developing generative artificial intelligence models to create three-dimensional assets from two-dimensional images, a Google spokesperson confirmed. The deal closed this week, according to the spokesperson. The spokesperson declined to provide a price. The company had around a dozen employees, according to its

The vOICe for Android v2.78 released #BCI

The vOICe for Android - Apps on Google Play
Augmented Reality for the Blind: See with your Ears!

Apple is nearing a deal with Google that would see the iPhone maker pay the tech giant roughly
$1 billion a year for a custom version of Google’s Gemini AI model
to power its overhaul of Siri.
The move is a big one for Apple,
which has traditionally relied on its own technology
but plans to use Google’s model as a temporary solution until its own AI becomes powerful enough,
including to power a slate of upcoming features for the voice assistant.
The…

Apple nears deal to pay Google $1B annually to power new Siri, report says | TechCrunch
Apple is turning to Google's technology to help revamp Siri and power a slate of upcoming features for the voice assistant.

This Tiny Library Can Replace Google When You're Offline
https://www.bgr.com/1998047/raspberry-pi-internet-in-a-box/

Google Is Spending Over $4 Billion on a Data Center Company
https://gizmodo.com/google-is-spending-over-4-billion-on-a-data-center-company-2000702751

https://www.zdnet.com/article/googles-ai-is-now-snooping-on-your-emails-heres-how-to-opt-out/
@…

Google's AI is now snooping on your emails - here's how to opt out
A new change quietly rolling out allows Google to access your private messages and attachments to train its AI models - likely without your knowledge. Opting out takes just moments.

from my link log —
Building a better Golang linker.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1D13QhciikbdLtaI67U6Ble5d_1nsI4befEd6_k1z91U/mobilebasic
saved 2020-08-12

(PUBLIC) Building a better Go linker
Building a better Go linker Austin Clements 2019-09-12 golang.org/s/better-linker Motivation As the scale of software built in Go grows, both the memory consumption and performance of the Go linker have become a problem for our users. We’ve had a fire drill after each of the past several Go relea...

Prices are up. Prices are down. Prices are higher but it's not the economy. What am I supposed to believe from this journalistic chaos?

Google Photos' latest generative AI-powered feature, "Me Meme", lets users create memes from their own images, launching first in the US (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/23/google-photos-latest-feature-lets-you-meme-…

Google Photos' latest feature lets you meme yourself | TechCrunch
The new feature lets you insert yourself into a meme in Google Photos.

Got that adversarial interoperability you asked for
https://www.theverge.com/news/825228/iphone-airdrop-android-quick-share-pixel-10

Google cracked Apple’s AirDrop and is adding it to Pixel phones
Google announced it’s added AirDrop-compatible file sharing that works between Pixel 10 devices and iPhones.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-11-20/former-google-chief-accused-of-spying-on-employees-through-account-backdoor
Holy sh*t
Ritter is accusing Schmidt of stealing business out from unde…

Former Google chief accused of spying on employees through account 'backdoor'
Former Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt was accused in a lawsuit filed Wednesday by a former girlfriend and business partner of using a Gmail "backdoor" to spy on her and company employees.

Here’s how I see it: we need the world but the world does not need Google. https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/115589890042809437

Ars Technica (@arstechnica@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image Google tells employees it must double capacity every 6 months to meet AI demand Google's AI infrastructure chief tells staff it needs thousandfold capacity increase in 5 years. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/google-tells-employees-it-must-double-capacity-every-6-months-to-meet-ai-demand/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Here is a list of fundraisers for Minneapolis school communities:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1W2RAD545vGkewQhAVUwOQ2VTc101_zoHHMUZqv07HYg/edit
Some of these have pretty low bank accounts. Anything helps.

Google launches free SAT practice exams in the Gemini app, providing students with performance analysis and detailed explanations for incorrect answers (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/22/google-now-offers-free-sat-pr…

Google now offers free SAT practice exams, powered by Gemini | TechCrunch
Students can prompt Gemini by typing "I want to take a practice SAT test,” and the AI will provide them with a free practice exam. Gemini then analyzes the results, highlighting strengths and identifying areas that need further review. It also offers detailed explanations for any incorrect answers. 

61 European alternatives to Google, X, Gmail, Chrome, Maps, DropBox, Google Drive, WhatsApp, and other popular services https://www.xataka.com/basics/61-alternativas-europeas-a-google-x-gmail-chrome-maps-dr…

With #openalex being mature enough, I have finally completed #degoogling my website 🥳
https://

Build software better, together
GitHub is where people build software. More than 150 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 420 million projects.

Google starts rolling out ads in AI mode; the ads look similar to the citations in AI answers but with a "sponsored" label (Mayank Parmar/BleepingComputer)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/artificial-intelligence/g…

Google begins showing ads in AI Mode (AI answers)
Google has started rolling out ads in AI mode, which is the company's "answer engine," not a search engine.

Oof the AI world is eating its own here
Somehow Google's AI got the wrong end of the stick about Meta's AI and Murati's AI and who is getting hired by whom
everybody's grifting all the time forever

Google rolls out Personal Intelligence in AI Mode, providing access to users' Gmail and Google Photos for more tailored responses, for US Pro and Ultra subs (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/22/goog

Google's AI Mode can now tap into your Gmail and Photos to provide tailored responses | TechCrunch
The company notes that AI Mode doesn’t train directly on your Gmail inbox or Google Photos library. Instead, it trains on specific prompts and the model’s responses. 

I've changed my mind -- Google and YouTube can't be trusted to do the right thing and must be reined in (Rand Paul/New York Post)
https://nypost.com/2026/01/19/opinion/rand-paul-ive-changed-my-mind-google-and-youtube-cant-be-trusted-to-do-the-right-thing-and-must-be-reined-in/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260120/p88#a260120p88

Gemini 3 is here https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/18/google-launches-gemini-3-with-new-coding-app-and-record-benchmark-scores/?AIagent.at

Google launches Gemini 3 with new coding app and record benchmark scores | TechCrunch
Google released Gemini 3, its latest and most advanced foundation model, to be made immediately available through the Gemini app and AI search interface.

Google's Nano Banana Pro and OpenAI's ChatGPT Images can make nonconsensual bikini deepfakes from photos of fully clothed women; Reddit bans r/ChatGPTJailbreak (Reece Rogers/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/google-and-openais-chatb…

Google’s and OpenAI’s Chatbots Can Strip Women in Photos Down to Bikinis
Users of AI image generators are offering each other instructions on how to use the tech to alter pictures of women into realistic, revealing deepfakes.

#Magika 1.0: Smarter, Faster #FileDetection with Rust and AI
https://www.infoq.com/news/2025/12/magika-

Want to check the google trends for a topic? Use {gtrendsR} directly from within your favorite language: #googletrends

GitHub - PMassicotte/gtrendsR: R functions to perform and display Google Trends queries
R functions to perform and display Google Trends queries - PMassicotte/gtrendsR

Someone ingested 2,911 Epstein documents into Google's NotebookLM. The auto-generated podcast is disturbing, but still better than most news outlets.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t2rnog2bVA_Zdf0pBQOzbns-ktMW8Kg5/view

Substack launches its Substack TV app for Apple TV and Google TV in beta for free and paid subscribers, with access matched to their current subscription levels (On Substack)
https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-the-substack-tv-app-now

Introducing the Substack TV app, now in beta
Taking subscriber video to the bigger screen

A look at Craig Federighi's approach to AI at Apple; sources say he led a push to use other companies' models to help launch a revamped Siri later in 2026 (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-deal-apples-…

With Google Deal, Apple’s Craig Federighi Plots a Cautious Course in AI
Last fall, Apple’s software chief, Craig Federighi, delivered a warm message to a meeting of the company’s combined software and AI groups. Federighi said he was excited about deeper collaboration between his software team and Apple’s AI group. But then came Federighi’s criticism. He added that ...

Google has filed a lawsuit to protect its search results,
targeting a firm called SerpApi
that has turned Google’s 10 blue links into a business.
According to Google, SerpApi ignores established law and Google’s terms
to scrape and resell its search engine results pages (SERPs).
This is not the first action against SerpApi, but Google’s decision to go after a scraper could signal a new, more aggressive stance on protecting its search data.

Google lobs lawsuit at search result scraping firm SerpApi
Google says the lawsuit is its last resort.

A US judge is expected to rule next year on breaking up Google's ad tech monopoly, after the DOJ and Google delivered closing arguments in a remedies hearing (David McCabe/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/technology/google-ad-tech-closing.html<…

The Fate of Google’s Ad Tech Monopoly Is Now in a Judge’s Hands
A judge queried lawyers about whether a breakup made sense during closing arguments on how to fix the tech giant’s dominance in online advertising.

At a recent all-hands meeting, Google's head of AI infrastructure Amin Vahdat said Google must double AI compute capacity every six months to meet demand (Jennifer Elias/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/21/google-says-it-must-dou…

Google must double AI compute every 6 months to meet demand, AI infrastructure boss tells employees
At a recent all-hands meeting, Google's head of AI infrastructure said the company has to race to build out compute capacity.

The senators America searched for most in 2025 (Stef W. Kight/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/12/19/bernie-sanders-most-google-searches-senators-2025
http://www.memeorandum.com/251219/p116#a251219p116

NYT reporter John Carreyrou and five other writers sue xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Perplexity, accusing them of pirating their books to train AI (Blake Brittain/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/n

Google invests an undisclosed sum in Sakana AI, valued at $2.6B in November 2025, to boost Gemini's presence in Japan; Sakana AI gains access to Google's LLMs (Min-Jeong Lee/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

from my link log —
Why NUKEMAP isn't on Google Maps anymore.
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2019/12/13/why-nukemap-isnt-on-google-maps-anymore/
saved 2019-12-14

Why NUKEMAP isn’t on Google Maps anymore
The top-secret story of why NUKEMAP switched from Google Maps to Mapbox+Leaflet.

This is an important announcement. Google uses it's ecosystem to gain an advantage, "Announcing Model Context Protocol (MCP) support for Google services"
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/ann…

Announcing official MCP support for Google services | Google Cloud Blog
Google is announcing official MCP support for Google and Google Cloud services for AI agents.

How the launch of Gemini 3, which surged ahead of models from OpenAI and other competitors on benchmark tests, has pushed Google ahead in the AI race (Katherine Blunt/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/google-gemini-3-ai-behind-scenes-e1787729?st…

Source: Google DeepMind signs a licensing deal with Hume AI, which builds emotionally intelligent voice interfaces, to hire CEO Alan Cowen and ~7 top engineers (Will Knight/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/google-hires-hume-ai-ceo-licensing-deal-gemini/

Google Acquires Top Talent From AI Voice Startup Hume AI in Licensing Deal
Hume AI’s CEO, Alan Cowen, will join Google DeepMind along with several top engineers as part of a major licensing deal.

Researchers detail popEVE, an AI model to predict the disease-causing potential of unknown human genetic mutations, and says it beats Google's AlphaMissense (Michael Peel/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/bc49e334-776b-41d0-a9be-fb0c29c54853

from my link log —
The missing datacenter OS.
http://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-missing-os.html
saved 2020-09-16 https://

Substack launches its Substack TV app for Apple TV and Google TV in beta for free and paid subscribers, with access matched to their current subscription levels (On Substack)
https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-the-substack-tv-app-now

Introducing the Substack TV app, now in beta
Taking subscriber video to the bigger screen

A US judge is expected to rule next year on breaking up Google's ad tech monopoly, after the DOJ and Google delivered closing arguments in a remedies hearing (David McCabe/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/technology/google-ad-tech-closing.html<…

The Fate of Google’s Ad Tech Monopoly Is Now in a Judge’s Hands
A judge queried lawyers about whether a breakup made sense during closing arguments on how to fix the tech giant’s dominance in online advertising.

Waymo launches its robotaxi service in Miami, its sixth market, initially covering a 60-square-mile area, and partners with Moove for fleet management (Lora Kolodny/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/22/waymo-launches-robotaxi-service-in-miami-…

Waymo launches robotaxi service in Miami, extending U.S. lead
Miami represents the sixth market for Waymo, which is owned by Google parent Alphabet.

Bengaluru-based digital payments startup Juspay raised $50M, in a mix of primary and secondary investments, from WestBridge Capital at a $1.2B valuation (The Economic Times)
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/t

Juspay closes $50 million funding from WestBridge Capital; valuation hits $1.2 billion
Founded in 2012, Bengaluru-based Juspay powers payment systems for major global brands such as Amazon, Flipkart, Google, IndiGo, and Swiggy. The company said in a statement that it now processes over 300 million transactions daily, with annualised total payment volume exceeding $1 trillion.

Gov. Newsom's 2026 budget proposal contains no funding for the California Civic Media Fund, despite a 2024 deal to provide $175M to newsrooms over five years (Yue Stella Yu/Los Angeles Times)
https://www.latimes.com/california/stor…

Newsom plans no new journalism funding despite $175-million funding deal with Google
It’s a significant walkback from an August 2024 deal between California leaders and Google to jointly spend $175 million over five years to fund local journalism.

Google confirms hackers stole Salesforce-stored data from 200 companies via a supply chain hack involving Gainsight, which provides a customer support platform (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/21/goog

Google says hackers stole data from 200 companies following Gainsight breach | TechCrunch
Notorious hacking collective Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters takes credit for the breach that affected Salesforce customers’ data, and said it is planning another extortion campaign.

Google says it needs more time to upgrade Assistant to Gemini on most Android devices; Google previously planned to complete the transition by the end of 2025 (Mariella Moon/Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/ai/google-assista

Google Assistant will stick around a bit longer than expected for some Android users
Google has announced that it needs a bit more time to make Gemini the new default digital helper for most of its users.

Google returns as a partner service for Movies Anywhere, after leaving the service during a feud with Disney in October and November (Will Sattelberg/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2025/12/18/google-youtube-return-movies-anywhere-how-to-re-…

Google and YouTube return to Movies Anywhere, here’s how to re-link your account
As promised, both Google Play and YouTube have returned to Movies Anywhere, here's how to restore your account link.

Google says the Gemini app is now able to detect images made by Google AI, with plans to roll out verification of video and audio (Dominic Preston/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/824786/google-gemini-synthid-ai-image-detection

Google Gemini is getting better at identifying AI fakes
Google is adding the ability to detect AI-generated images in the Gemini app, but only if they include Google’s own SynthID watermark.

Sources: Google is offering voluntary buyouts to employees in its UK offices, following similar offers in several US divisions this year (Hugh Langley/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-offers-voluntary-buyouts-uk-employees-ve…

Google offers voluntary buyouts to UK employees
After offering teams in the US voluntary buyouts earlier this year, Google is now doing the same in the UK.

A profile of Josh Woodward, the head of Google Labs who is credited with turning around the Gemini app, growing its MAUs from 350M in March to 650M by October (Jennifer Elias/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/20/josh-woodward-google-gemini-ai-safety.html

Google was at risk of losing its dominance — until it promoted this AI executive
Josh Woodward, a 16-year Google veteran, is tasked with running the Gemini app and going head-to-head with OpenAI in the booming generative AI market.

How Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are testing AI models by having them play Pokémon Blue on Twitch to track a model's ability to reason and make decisions (Isabelle Bousquette/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/art…

Sources: OpenAI begins offering its chatbot ads to dozens of advertisers, initially charging per ad view, not per ad click, and asks them for <$1M commitments (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-lines-adver…

OpenAI Lines Up Advertisers, Reveals Key Details Ahead of Ads Launch
OpenAI has started offering its new chatbot ads to dozens of advertisers, according to two people familiar with the matter. To start off, the company is charging on the basis of ad views as opposed to per-ad clicks that are typical at large sellers of search ads like Google and Amazon, the ...

Analysis: the top US tech companies spent $109M on DC lobbying in 2025, topping $100M for the first time; Meta spent $26.29M, Amazon $17.78M, and Google $13.1M (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-…

Google advises some employees on visas, including H-1B visas, not to travel outside the US due to processing delays, following new social media screening rules (Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-tells-visa-holders-stamp-le…

Google warns some visa employees not to leave the US due to 'significant' return delays of up to a year
The US State Department said it was "prioritizing thoroughly vetting" each visa case, which could cause delays.

Google sues data scraping company SerpApi for allegedly using hundreds of millions of fake search requests to access copyrighted material from Google products (Blake Brittain/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/g

Internal memo: Sam Altman told OpenAI employees last month that Google's recent progress in AI could "create some temporary economic headwinds for our company" (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/op

OpenAI CEO Warns of ‘Headwinds’ From Resurgent Google
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told colleagues last month that Google’s recent progress in artificial intelligence could “create some temporary economic headwinds for our company,” though he added that OpenAI would emerge ahead. After OpenAI researchers heard that Google had created a new AI that appears ...

Google's TPUs and Gemini are competitive but Nvidia's and OpenAI's first-mover advantage makes their lead seem durable, and Google faces the innovator's dilemma (SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2025/12/21/nvidia-maintains-moat-gemini-…

Why Nvidia maintains its moat and Gemini won’t kill OpenAI - SiliconANGLE
Why Nvidia maintains its moat and Gemini won’t kill OpenAI - SiliconANGLE

Italy's competition authority closes its July 2024 probe into Google's alleged unfair practices over users' personal data after Google adopted remedies (Gianluca Semeraro/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/…

Google launches Gemini 3 Pro Image, aka Nano Banana Pro, with more control, improved text rendering, and enhanced world knowledge, for free in the Gemini app (Abner Li/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2025/11/20/gemini-3-nano-banana-pro/

Google rolling out Gemini 3-powered ‘Nano Banana Pro’ image gen, editing
Google is following the launch of Gemini 3 Pro with Nano Banana Pro. The image generation and editing model is officially Gemini 3 Pro Image.

A look at Google's TPU evolution, its decision to sell chips to competitors after 12 years of internal use, the TPU vs. GPU architecture showdown, and more (The Chip Letter)
https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/tpu-mania

TPU Mania
Is GPU vs TPU the CISC vs RISC contest of the modern era?

Google DeepMind hires former Boston Dynamics CTO Aaron Saunders as VP of hardware engineering, as Demis Hassabis envisions Gemini to become a sort of robot OS (Will Knight/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/google-hires-cto-boston-dynamics-demis-hassabis-…

Google DeepMind Hires Former CTO of Boston Dynamics as the Company Pushes Deeper Into Robotics
DeepMind's chief says he envisions Gemini as an operating system for physical robots. The company has hired Aaron Saunders to help make that a reality.

Google starts rolling out ads in AI mode; the ads look similar to the citations in AI answers but with a "sponsored" label (Mayank Parmar/BleepingComputer)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/artificial-intelligence/g…

Google plans to release Gemini 3 Deep Think to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the coming weeks, once it passes further rounds of safety testing (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/18/google-launches-gemini-3-…

Google launches Gemini 3 with new coding app and record benchmark scores | TechCrunch
Google released Gemini 3, its latest and most advanced foundation model, to be made immediately available through the Gemini app and AI search interface.

Google announces Gemini 3, its "most intelligent" and "factually accurate" model yet, with improvements across coding, reasoning, and less "flattery" (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/822977/gemini-3-google-ai-model-launch<…

Google is launching Gemini 3, its ‘most intelligent’ AI model yet
Google is launching Gemini 3, the latest version of its flagship AI model, which offers better coding capabilities that allow it to embed visualizations directly inside its answer.

Google plans to charge developers $2.85/app and $3.65/game if a US user follows a link that takes them outside of the Play Store to install it within 24 hours (Sean Hollister/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/848540/google-app-fees-ext…

Want to link from Google’s app store to your app? That’ll be $2–4 per install
Google will charge fees when Android developers link outside of the Play Store, or use alternative billing systems, and says it’s complying with the Epic injunction.

Humans&, founded by ex-Anthropic, xAI, and Google staff to build interactive AI, raised a $480M seed from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, and others at a $4.48B valuation (Cade Metz/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/20/technology/humans-ai-anthropic-xai.html<…

An A.I. Start-Up Says It Wants to Empower Workers, Not Replace Them
Founded by researchers from Anthropic, Google and xAI, the new company, Humans&, is already valued at $4.48 billion.

Pornhub parent company Aylo sent letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft urging the adoption of device-based age verification across their app stores and OSes (Jason Parham/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/pornhub-is-urging-tech-giants-to-e…

Pornhub Is Urging Tech Giants to Enact Device-Based Age Verification
The company sent letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft pushing for an alternative way to keep minors from viewing porn, as US and UK laws have caused its traffic to plummet.

Google launches Antigravity, an "agent-first" coding tool that leverages Gemini 3 Pro and third-party models, available in free public preview (Dominic Preston/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/822833/google-antigravity-ide-coding-agent-…

Google Antigravity is an ‘agent-first’ coding tool built for Gemini 3
Available in free preview now with Gemini 3 Pro, Google Antigravity supports browser control and provides proof of its work.

Gemini 3 Pro is integrated into the Gemini app, which now has 650M MAUs, and powers Google Search's AI Mode conversational search feature (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/business/google-gemini-3.html

Google Unveils Gemini 3, With Improved Coding and Search Abilities
The new artificial intelligence model is the second the company has released this year. OpenAI and Anthropic made similar updates a few months ago.

Gemini co-lead Oriol Vinyals says Gemini 3's gains come from better pre-training and post-training, contradicting the idea that pre-training gains are falling (Stephanie Palazzolo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-unseats-anthropic-…

Google Unseats Anthropic With Gemini 3
Before we get to Gemini 3, we want to highlight this morning’s news that former Harvard University President Larry Summers has resigned from OpenAI’s board of directors following a congressional committee’s release of emails showing a personal correspondence between him and convicted sex ...

How Google, Huawei, Microsoft, and Nvidia, as well as startups and university research teams, spent millions of dollars to develop AI weather forecasting tools (Tim Fernholz/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-22/how…

Google Cloud and Palo Alto Networks strike a deal that a source says is Google Cloud's largest security services deal "approaching $10B" over several years (Kenrick Cai/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/google-cl

Filing: Airbnb says CTO Ari Balogh, who joined seven years ago from Google, plans to step down in December (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-21/airbnb-says-chief-technology-officer-balogh-to-depar…

Google sues the Chinese-speaking cybercriminal group known as Darcula, behind an alleged US text message phishing ring, in the US, seeking a restraining order (Kevin Collier/NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/google-sues…

Google sues Chinese scam ring over E-ZPass, USPS phishing texts
Google is suing a Chinese-speaking cybercriminal group it says is responsible for a massive wave of scam text messages sent to Americans this year.

Nvidia and Google launch the GeForce Now Fast Pass to let Chromebook owners stream over 2,000 games directly from an existing PC game library without ads (Dominic Preston/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/824940/chromebooks-nvidia-geforce-now-fa…

New Chromebooks will come with a year of Nvidia’s cloud gaming ‘fast pass’
Nvidia GeForce Now Fast Pass is an ad-free queue-jump for GeForce Now’s free tier, and it’s exclusive to Chromebook owners.

Google makes Gemini 3 Flash the default model in Gemini app and Search's AI mode; it scored 33.7% without tool use on Humanity's Last Exam vs. GPT-5.2's 34.5% (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/17/goog

Google launches Gemini 3 Flash, makes it the default model in the Gemini app | TechCrunch
Google is making Gemini 3 Flash the default model in the Gemini app and oAI model for Search

Google says it's appealing the US v. Google ruling that found it has an illegal search monopoly and asks a court to pause some of the remedies during the appeal (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/863710/google-search-antitrust-monopoly-ap…

Google is appealing a judge’s search monopoly ruling
Google filed a notice to appeal Judge Amit Mehta’s ruling calling it an illegal search monopolist and requesting to pause some of his ordered remedies.

Google launches CC, an experimental AI assistant that delivers a personalized daily "Your Day Ahead" briefing email based on users' emails and calendar (Robert Hart/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/845280/google-cc-morning-briefing-gemini…

Google wants its AI assistant CC to replace your morning scroll
Google’s AI agent CC is similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pulse, delivering a personalized morning briefing based on your Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive.

Sources: OpenAI begins offering its chatbot ads to dozens of advertisers, initially charging per ad view, not per ad click, and asks them for <$1M commitments (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-lines-adver…

OpenAI Lines Up Advertisers, Reveals Key Details Ahead of Ads Launch
OpenAI has started offering its new chatbot ads to dozens of advertisers, according to two people familiar with the matter. To start off, the company is charging on the basis of ad views as opposed to per-ad clicks that are typical at large sellers of search ads like Google and Amazon, the ...

Sources: internal Google data shows Gemini API calls surged from 35B in March 2025 to 85B in August 2025; Google says Gemini Enterprise hit 8M subscribers (Erin Woo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/googles-gemini-sees-skyrocketi…

Google’s Gemini Sees Skyrocketing Business Sales
Google’s improvements to its Gemini AI models are boosting the company’s top line. Over the past year, Google’s business selling access to its Gemini AI models has skyrocketed, reflecting the improving quality of those models, according to three people with knowledge of Gemini’s sales. That’s ...

Sources: Google has formed a new executive council to allocate computing capacity given a critical shortage; members include Thomas Kurian and Demis Hassabis (Erin Woo/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/inside-balancing-act-googles-co…

Inside the Balancing Act Over Google’s Compute Crunch
Earlier this year, Google convened a group of its top executives to address what some staffers see as an existential problem: the company doesn’t have enough computer chips for everyone who wants them. A shortage of computing capacity was creating internal tensions, as leaders of Google’s varied ...

The CSA says Matter will support video cameras for the first time with Matter 1.5; Amazon and Google have not committed to making their cameras interoperable (Chris Welch/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025…

Google says Gemini 3 Pro scores 1,501 on LMArena, above 2.5 Pro, and demonstrates PhD-level reasoning with top scores on Humanity's Last Exam and GPQA Diamond (Abner Li/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2025/11/18/gemini-3-launch/

Google launches Gemini 3 with state-of-the-art reasoning, ‘generative UI’ for responses, more
Google today announced Gemini 3 with the goal of bringing “any idea to life.” The first model available in this family is Gemini 3 Pro...

Google sues data scraping company SerpApi for allegedly using hundreds of millions of fake search requests to access copyrighted material from Google products (Blake Brittain/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/g

Google opens an AI infrastructure hardware engineering hub in Taipei, its biggest outside of the US, to develop and test tech to be deployed in its data centers (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/google-opens-new-ai-engin…

FTC v. Meta: TikTok's rise undermined the FTC's antitrust case and helped Meta avoid a breakup; Judge Boasberg said the tech landscape has "changed markedly" (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/18/technology/meta-google-antitrust-t…

Technology Is Fast and the Courts Are Slow
Silicon Valley has increasingly pointed at rapid digital changes to blunt government efforts to rein in its power.

Forecasters at the US National Hurricane Center are increasingly leaning on Google's new DeepMind prediction model, though questions about its methods remain (Eric Holthaus/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/16/google-deepm…

Google unveils Gemini 3 Flash that it says offers Pro-level performance with lower latency, higher efficiency, and reduced costs compared to 2.5 Pro (Abner Li/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2025/12/17/gemini-3-flash-launch/

Google announces Gemini 3 Flash with Pro-level performance, rolling out now
Following last month's launch of Gemini 3 Pro, Google today announced Gemini 3 Flash for consumers and developers.

Google is shutting down its dark web monitoring tool, launched in 2024 to alert users when their personal info is detected on the dark web, on February 16, 2026 (Ben Schoon/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2025/12/15/google-dark-web-report-shutting-down/<…

Google is shutting down its ‘Dark web report’ tool after just over a year
One of the lesser-known features that Google offers is a “Dark Web Report” monitoring tool, but it’s about to shut...

Filing: Nvidia says it plans to rent $26B worth of servers over the next six years, doubling the cloud spending commitments it disclosed three months ago (Anissa Gardizy/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/nvidia-doubles-clou…

Nvidia Doubles Cloud Spending Commitment to $26 Billion
Nvidia said Wednesday it had struck deals to rent $26 billion of servers from cloud providers over the next six years, doubling the cloud spending commitments it disclosed just three months ago. The cloud spending plan implies Nvidia will rent several hundred thousand of its own graphics processing units from cloud providers like Amazon and Google that purchase them. Nvidia said in a

Google tests AI-powered overviews on some publications' Google News pages; publishers like Der Spiegel, El País, and WaPo in commercial partnerships get paid (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/10/goog

Google is testing AI-powered article overviews on select publications’ Google News pages | TechCrunch
By adding AI-powered article overviews, Google says users will get more context before they click through to read an article.

Google launches Gemini Personal Intelligence, linking to Gmail, Google Photos, Search, and YouTube history to provide context-aware responses, for paid users (Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET)
https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-gemini-personal-intelligence/

Gemini's new Personal Intelligence will look through your emails and photos - if you let it
Can the feature do what Apple Intelligence promised? Here's what it will and won't have access to, and how it'll impact privacy.

Sources: Apptronik, a humanoid robot maker backed by Google, is in the process of raising at least $400M led by B Capital at a $5B pre-money valuation (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-backed-apptronik-tal…

Google-Backed Apptronik in Talks to Raise Funding at $5 Billion Valuation
Apptronik, a humanoid robot maker backed by Google, is in the process of raising at least $400 million at a $5 billion valuation not including the new money, according to two people familiar with the discussions. The new round,led by B Capital, would at least triple the startup’s valuation from ...

Google brings its vibe coding tool Opal to Gemini on the web, letting users create their own custom apps called Gems; the mini apps can be reused later (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/17/googles-vibe-coding-tool-opal-comes-to-gemini/

Google's vibe-coding tool Opal comes to Gemini | TechCrunch
The company on Wednesday said it is integrating the tool, which lets you build AI-powered mini apps, inside the Gemini web app, allowing users to create their own custom apps.