Google goes nuclear; brings Gemini to Chrome
While OpenAI is still working on a browser and others are cautious or have failed to take off, Google is done waiting. They are now building the Gemini assistant directly into the world’s most popular browser. «Gemini with Chrome» will navigate and summarize your tabs for you, offer helpful suggestions in the URL bar, and should soon help you order stuff online. It can even find your closed tabs and search for references inside Youtube videos. It’s rolling out to Mac and Windows users with language set to English as of this writing. They call it «a new era of browsing.»
More at Google’s launch page, Google’s overview and launch thread.
Hands-on with Meta’s new Ray-Bans
Has Meta found the Goldilocks zone of smart glasses? Their recently launched Ray-Bans with an internal screen seems to have hit the sweet spot with reviewers. The Verge calls them the best smart glasses out there, Tom’s Hardware says it «feels like the future,» and Gizmodo writes that you’re going to want a pair. The consensus seems to be that the in-lens screen is quite useful, just about bright enough and it hits the sweet spot with the new wristband.
More at Mashable’s roundup.
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Microsoft prefers Claude for coding
The Visual Studio code editor is getting an automatic model picker, and so far it prefers Claude Sonnet 4 over GPT-5. This also goes for GitHub Copilot free users. Internal coders at Microsoft are even telling The Verge that they have been instructed to use Claude in recent months. In addition, the software behemoth has found that Sonnet 4 outperformed ChatGPT in Excel and Powerpoint, and will be partially preferred for Microsoft 365 Copilot.
More at The Verge, via Slashdot.
Veo 3 is coming to YouTube
Google’s popular video generator is coming to the vertical video service — and yes, it does support the format. It’s a custom version of the Veo 3 Fast model that can create clips from a single prompt — with sound. It can also animate pictures and make people dance. You can also set it to create music, and turn spoken words into song. Given how popular Veo 3 became at launch, it wouldn’t be too fancy to guess that this really could turn up the creativity on the service, or flood us with «slop.»
More at YouTube’s launch page, DeepMind’s x thread.