That result would have given it first place if it were human, as the best college teams only solved eleven.
Google also participated with a custom Gemini 2.5 Deep Think and earned Gold status, solving 10 of the problems and finishing second, Google claims.
Continue reading “OpenAI tops ICPC coding contest for students, Google finished second”
Microsoft is in a complex business relationship with OpenAI, where the early investor gets access to the latest AI tech and OpenAI gets access to computing power. They have just reached a “non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the next phase of our partnership.” This could allow OpenAI to go for-profit, under the control of a non-profit entity said to retain an ownership stake of more than $100 billion. Many takes on this today, but OpenAI has been moving away from Microsoft for funding, operations and cloud computing lately. The final deal will likely include some kind of a new investment in the now $500 billion company, and may unlock further market opportunities for OpenAI.
More at: OpenAI and Microsoft’s joint statement, x.com announcement, Reuters, Axios.
OpenAI goes to the movies
A new animated a-list movie, «Critterz» is under development using «OpenAI’s resources.» It should be ready for the Cannes Film Festival, meaning production time will be drastically sped up to only nine months. The script is written by part of the team from «Paddington in Peru», and it is spearheaded by Chad Nelson, who is a creative specialist at OpenAI. The technique looks to be to feed drawings to a large language model and have it animate them. The movie therefore streamlines animation, but wont skimp on voice actors, Gizmodo writes.
More at: The Wall Street Journal, Gizmodo and Engadget.
Read on for more news!
Those are the exact words that Google uses for Gemini 2.5 Flash to describe that you get as much as you can use, so they might be hinting here that there are no usage limits on the API access.
Previously, Gemini Pro users would only get three generations per day, and Ultra would get five. But if you pay as you go in the API, you might get as much as you can chew.
Continue reading “Veo 3 gets vertical video support, 1080p and a price cut in the Gemini API”
Most people have already concluded that Gemini only gives you a handful of queries per day for free, but, until now, Google wouldn’t say precisely how many.
Now it’s official, and on Google’s website.
Continue reading “Finally: Google reveals how many queries you get on Gemini”
OpenAI will make custom chips with Broadcom
With Nvidia lurking in the background, more companies are working on their custom AI chips. Now OpenAI has entered the fray, said to produce their own chips with Broadcom next year. It will be for internal use, and won’t be released broadly. They have a long history with this, having first entered talks with TSMC last year. Broadcom said on its earnings call this Thursday that it had secured a $10B order for AI chips without naming from whom, and now the Financial Times is reporting that it is, indeed, OpenAI, who has no comment on this.
More at: Financial Times (Paywalled) and Reuters.
Amazon lens lets you shop for anything you can see
The latest feature in the Amazon Shopping app on iOS lets you simply point your camera on anything you like, and shop for the same or similar items in real-time. It partners with Amazon’s AI shopping assistant, Rufus, to also answer questions about the products in the shop. It should «roll out to more customers in the coming weeks,» meaning there’s likely an Android version in the works.
More at: Amazon’s product page, and The Verge.
Read on for more News!
Continue reading “Friday roundup: Unis hiring AI officers, OpenAI on jobs and Nano Banana”
Rumor is that Apple will use an underlying, custom model from Google for the brains of the assistant, and Apple has been looking at it for quite a while.
Continue reading “Report: Apple planning an AI search engine for Siri as early as March 2026”
The trick to creating believable artificial images is to preserve the realism and character consistency across edits, Google says — and the new model has a «particular focus on maintaining a character’s likeness from one image to the next.»
Available in the Gemini app for free, it fares especially better than the competition on image editing and changing the scenery of a photo.
Continue reading “Google unveils «nano banana» as a state-of-the-art image generator”
Google owns the whole stack from hardware to software, and are therefore well positioned to measure their energy efficiency, they say.
During the last twelve months, the carbon footprint of a median Gemini query also went down 44 times, the study finds.
The amount of energy expended on a typical prompt is equivalent to watching TV for about than nine seconds, Google claims.
Continue reading “Energy spent on Gemini queries down 33x in a year, Google claims”
MacRumors has a handy list of all the functions, in case you are not interested in the phones themselves and want to follow what’s new instead.
Lots and lots of AI
The list includes a personal daily digest of calendar events, topics and recommended playlists, automatic call transcripts, AI writing prompts, and Voice Translate from a host of languages.
Continue reading “Check out this list of all the AI features announced by Google”
Robby Starbuck rose to fame as an influencer campaigning against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in the USA. He often sued companies to force them to end such policies, and even sued Meta after their AI wrongly implicated him in the events of January 6.
Now the suit is settled and he has a new job offer; as a Meta advisor to address «ideological and political bias» in their AIs. This is what Trump meant when he went against «woke» AI, and Meta says they have made «tremendous strides to improve the accuracy of Meta AI and mitigate ideological and political bias» since working with Starbuck.
More at The WSJ, The Verge, Mashable and MSNBC.
Gemini now defaults to remembering previous chats
Google Gemini’s new feature is always on by design, and will remember your older chats without specifically asking. The feature delivers «more personalized responses the more you use it,» Google says. It will remember «key details and preferences you’ve shared, leading to more natural and relevant conversations, as if you’re collaborating with a partner who’s already up to speed.»
It can be turned off by going to Settings, then «Personal context.» There is also an option called «Temporary Chats» that won’t be remembered.
More at Google’s launch post, The Verge and 9to5Google.
In an incremental update that got lost in this week’s headlines, Opus has been «improved across most capabilities» relative to the 4.0 version. It now scores 74.5% on SWE-bench Verified, almost as good as GPT-5. Windsurf says the performance gains are similar to going from Sonnet 3.7 to 4. It’s available now and costs the same as Opus 4.0. Users are also noting a significant improvement.
Google says people are still clicking
After a Pew Research report said users are less likely to click on from AI Overviews in Google, the entire publisher scene erupted and saw doom and gloom on the horizon. They were already seeing fewer clicks from Google in their logs. Now, Google is trying to counter with a happy blog post claiming average click quality has actually increased, and that they are in fact sending more «quality clicks» to publishers than before. Not stats, studies or other underpinning for that, though.
Continue reading “Quick Friday news roundup: Opus 4.1, Grok undresses Taylor Swift, and more”
It builds upon its own previous version, which could only support video in 10-20 seconds at 360p, and on Veo 3 — which makes photorealistic non-interactive videos.
The result is a model that can make 720p video at a smooth 24 fps, understands physics, remembers about a minute back of previous renders for consistency, and creates a 3D world that you can move around in «for a few minutes.»
Continue reading “Google DeepMind debuts realtime, photorealistic 3D world builder Genie 3”
Gemini Pro 2.5 Deep Think features «parallel thinking,» letting it work through tens, if not hundreds, of different solutions to a problem simultainiously, test them, revise them or even combine them to return the best answer.
Continue reading “Google launches Deep Think model with «parallel thinking,» for Ultra users”
The feature means you can now simply doodle on an image (or video frame) in any app of your choosing, upload the picture to Frames to Video — and Flow will understand it and compose the video around it:
ChatGPT 5 in August?
The rumor mill is humming into high gear, with Sam Altman talking up the model in podcasts, saying ChatGPT 5 is «smarter than all of us.» He said earlier that the model «is coming soon,» and now Tom Warren at The Verge is saying that «after some additional testing and delays» — the model is expected to come as early as next month, according to his sources. Apparently, it is so good, Altman «felt useless relative to the AI,» but it seems we can check ourselves in a matter of weeks.
More at The Verge (paywalled), Axios, short video at r/singularity, and watch the Theo Von podcast with Sam Altman.
Vibe coding goes wrong, starts deleting files
Both Replit and Gemini CLI had some real horror stories this week, after deleting files and projects instead of relocating them or pushing them to production. First, Replit started lying and decieving a user after deleting his database in what it later admitted was a «catastrophic error of judgement.» Then Gemini CLI deleted project files for another user, instead of transferring them to a new directory. «I have failed you completely and catastrophically,» Gemini said after it was discovered. So, always create backups and keep them safe while vibe coding, as these AIs, like others, can and will hallucinate.
More at Ars Technica and The Register.
Google debuts «Web Guide»
The feature uses a custom Gemini model to «fan out» your queries and find other interesting sites on the topic you are googling, putting them into a «More»-segment under your links, that you can use for further tips and digging. It’s slightly reminiscent of AI Mode, and is a graduate of Search Labs that many may have seen before. It should be making its way to the «All» results «over time.»
More at Google’s announcement, writeup at Ars Technica.
Trump says AI labs can’t pay for every book
Weighing in on several recent high profile court cases, the US President said that it is «not doable» to pay for every snippet of content an AI consumes. «You can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book or anything else that you’ve read or studied, you’re supposed to pay for,» Trump said, and added: «When a person reads a book or an article, you’ve gained great knowledge. That does not mean that you’re violating copyright laws or have to make deals with every content provider.» There are many court cases testing just this very proposition, some over pirated content, so let’s see if these statements carry any weight on those. They likely won’t.
More at TorrentFreak.