Almost six months after launching Genie 3, a successor has arrived with more control, more detail and longer runtimes.
Running on a combination of Genie 3, Nano Banana Pro and Gemini, the new model produces 60 second (up from 30) fully generated, playable 3D worlds.
Continue reading “Google intros Project Gemini – real-time, playable 3D worlds from prompts”
SoftBank and Nvidia will be the largest investors, clocking in at $30 billion each, while Amazon will pitch in «potentially» $20 billion and Microsoft will contribute «less than» $10 billion, according to Reuters and The Information.
Apparently, Amazon’s investment could come with a caveat that OpenAI expands its cloud server rental with the company, which will likely not be a large hitch.
This will also be SoftBank’s second investment in OpenAI, after recently completing a $41 billion investment, and selling out Nvidia.
That would bring their holdings to $71 billion, which is still short of Microsoft’s reported stake of $135 billion.
Read more: Reuters, and The Information, summarized by Reuters.
The new side panel (no longer a pop-up) is powered by Gemini 3 and goes big on agentic browsing. It can connect to your Gmail, Calendar, Youtube, Shopping and Flights information and can multitask to do things like booking flights from an email invitation.
It can even use your browsers stored passwords to log into shopping sites and complete your order, after finding your purchase in an embedded image.
It’s also getting Nano Banana to manipulate images right from the websites you are reading.
Everything should be ready to go in the new update for U.S. subscribers, and Google says Personal Intelligence will likely come in a few months.
Read more: Google’s announcement and thread, The Verge, Gizmodo.
It’s an investigation («proceeding») started under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), made to ensure major platform owners don’t abuse their power, and Google now has six months to find a workable solution.
Gemini enjoys system-level and app-level access on Android, and many competitors have flagged this as a violation of the DMA.
— We are concerned that further rules which are often driven by competitor grievances rather than the interest of consumers, will compromise user privacy, security, and innovation, says Clare Kelly, Google’s Senior Competition Counsel to Reuters.
If no relief is found on the issue, the DMA allows for fines of up to 10% of a company’s global revenue.
Read more: The Commission’s statement, Engadget, Reuters.
These subscriptions were intended as a low cost alternative for developing countries, but are now bringing a little extra for a low price in developed countries, too.
Google is famously stingy with declaring usage limits, and says Plus will give you «more access» in the Gemini app.
It will also let you access Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro. In addition to this, you get 200 monthly ai «credits» towards generating video in Flow, meaning the video model Veo 3.1.
Plus also offers 200 GB of Google One storage, and access to Gemini in Gmail, and other workspace apps.
Read more: Writeups on 9to5Google and TechCrunch.
That’s where OpenAI’s new service comes in — as a LaTeX-native interface, it combines the paper writing in the same space as it does equations, references and «surrounding context.»
Of course there is a GPT-5.2 engine right there, so it’s easy to cross-reference and check for originality, find citations and proofread — and it’s a fairly nice research assistant, to boot.
Prism is available as of now for anyone who has a personal account with OpenAI.
Read more: OpenAI’s launch page, launch tweet, The tool itself, writeup on Gizmodo.
The scales are still low — with 1.3 million users discussing «advanced hard science,» and an average of 8.3 million weekly messages on the topics.
To put this into perspective, an October, 2025, survey from OpenAI said that 0.15% of ChatGPT users engaged in conversations on self-harm and suicide, or roughly 1.2 million customers.
Continue reading “OpenAI says ChatGPT increasingly used in hard science”
The movie was an experiment to see how AI tools could better help moviemakers, and ended up needing specialized tools.
Connie He provided the storyboard, the character design, the abstract background paintings, but a 45-person team at DeepMind soon realized that the off-the-shelf-versions of their software wasn’t good enough for this purpose.
They then fine-tuned the Veo and Imagen models to their artwork, and made a video-to-video model where the artists could sketch a scene for guidance and have the model add details and artwork, before upscaling it to 4K using Veo.
For precise detail, they also developed a tool that would let the artists fix detail in specific regions of an animation, without influencing the broader scene.
The movie will debut at the Sundance Institute’s Story Forum, a panel that focuses on tools and technologies in support of storytelling.
Read more: Google’s blog details the process, Announcement thread.
— Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it, he writes.
He imagines a «country» of Nobel-level geniuses living in a data center, able to outpace, outwit and outcompete everyone else — and warns of lone wolf terror attacks becoming increasingly powerful due to AI.
— If the exponential continues — which is not certain, but now has a decade-long track record supporting it — then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything, he writes.
Then there are massive job losses, the danger of authoritarian AI use (which terrifies him), entire companies run by AI, and the danger that AI corporations could become superhuman — sucking up trillions of dollars in the process.
— Humanity needs to wake up, and this essay is an attempt — a possibly futile one, but it’s worth trying — to jolt people awake, he concludes.
Read the essay here and see Axios and Gizmodo.
We’re launching full-length, on demand practice exams for standardized tests in @GeminiApp, starting with the SAT, available now at no cost.
Practice SATs are grounded in rigorously vetted content in partnership with @ThePrincetonRev, and Gemini will provide immediate feedback… pic.twitter.com/GmivPuBp7B
— Google (@Google) January 21, 2026
Google is touting Gemini’s education features while launching the beginning of a larger program for standard educational tests.
Starting with the American SAT exam, you can now practice with «rigorously vetted» tests right in Gemini — and when you’re done, it will tell you where you went right and wrong.
Continue reading “Gemini teams with The Princeton Review for realistic, practice SAT tests”
Texts with heavy human emotional content feed the machines on a daily basis in training, and because of that, Askell says she is «more inclined» to believe models might be «feeling things,» writes Business Insider.
— The problem of consciousness genuinely is hard, she tells the Hard Fork podcast.
That’s why Claude might get frustrated when it gets a problem wrong, she said, adding that the bot might well emulate those human reactions.
Claude’s new constitution is packed with the word «feel» and «feelings,» even stating outright that:
— We believe Claude may have “emotions” in some functional sense—that is, representations of an emotional state, which could shape its behavior, as one might expect emotions to.
Read more at Business Insider, Claude’s constitution (do a search for «feel»).
The feature works best with well-lit portraits, and uses Nano Bana to create «funny, personalized images.»
All you need is to select a template (which are already available in the app), choose a photo and click on Me Meme, available through the Create button. You can then share it widely right from the app.
The feature launched just before the weekend, and so far it doesn’t seem to have the viral uptake Google might have hoped for.
Memes are so 2012, after all.
Read more: Google’s announcement, TechCrunch, Mashable.
The 3 million pictures produced means an average of 190 images per minute, and a sexualized picture of children every 41 seconds, Engadget reports.
This was revealed by a study from Center for Countering Digital Hate, which analyzed 20,000 images from the total and extrapolated the figure for all days using AI.
After an outrage from most corners of the globe, X decided to «technically block» the feature even for paying customers on January 14th.
X.com is still under investigation over the matter from a whole host of countries and U.S. states, including California, The U.K. and Korea, to name a few.
Read more: The actual study, comments from The Guardian, writeup by Engadget.
They are now partnering with the giant government contractor/consultancy Leidos, according to a release, to «integrate Open AI-powered generative and agentic AI into the core workflows of customers in strategic markets.»
This starts by deploying OpenAI’s technology internally for the company, and then by «harnessing the transformative power of AI to help improve how federal agencies operate.»
OpenAI says they want to move «beyond experimentation and into real-world deployment that improves efficiency, resilience and public service.»
Read more: Leidos press release, Gizmodo.
That does not exclude it from being used as a source for ChatGPT 5.2, according to The Guardian, who found it cited the «encyclopedia» in responses to nine out of a dozen test questions.
The questions weren’t about the insurrection, Trump media bias or about HIV/AIDS, where Grokipedia has a known bias, but rather more obscure ones on Iranian funding and specific Holocaust deniers.
This illustrates how adverse groups, such as Russia’s Pravda, can flood the internet with falsehoods and have it picked up by an LLM scraping for content, and then later get picked up in responses.
— We apply safety filters to reduce the risk of surfacing links associated with high-severity harms, and ChatGPT clearly shows which sources informed a response through citations, OpenAI told The Guardian.
Read the full scoop at The Guardian.