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Weekend roundup; Chrome gets Gemini, Microsoft goes Claude and Veo comes to Youtube

Google is letting Gemini loose on the world's most popular browser. — While others are still struggling with the AI-based browser, Google is going all-in with Chrome. (Picture: Google)

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.

Read on for more!

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OpenAI tops ICPC coding contest for students, Google finished second

OpenAI solved 12 of 12 problems with vanilla GPT-5. Google had a custom model and solved 10. — OpenAI says they will now focus on scientific discovery. (Picture: OpenAI)

ChatGPT solved all 12 of 12 problems in the 2025 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) — an algorithmic programming contest for university students.

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.

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Owner of Billboard, Rolling Stone, sues Google over AI Overviews

To stop AI Overviews, you also need to stop appearing in Google's search results, and there is no way of opting out, Penske says. — Speaking for the entire media industry, Penske says AI Overviews are creating havoc on their business model. (Picture: screenshot)

Penske Media Corporation claims Google is siphoning off traffic to their websites and stealing their content with the overviews feature.

This is the first major publisher suing Google for the feature, as research from Pew shows that less than one percent of users click on from links that have an AI Overview on the results.

20% drop in traffic
PMC, which is also the parent company of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, has seen traffic drop by some 20% and affiliate revenue decline 30% since Google’s overviews started on their stories.

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Veo 3 gets vertical video support, 1080p and a price cut in the Gemini API

Finally tiktok an reels ready, veo 3 has opened up a market for virality — Veo 3 is getting some massive API updates today. (Picutre: Screenshot).

In a big day for video generation at Google, the Veo 3 generator finally gets ready for Tiktok and Reels — while also hitting «general availability» in the API, according to a new blog post.

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.

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Finally: Google reveals how many queries you get on Gemini

For the first time, Google is sharing its real usage limits on their website. — Gemini is stingy with its free users, now we know exactly by how much. (Picture: Google)

Google has decided to come clean on the usage limits of its Gemini plans — and it’s a mixed bag for the free tier.

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.

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Report: Apple planning an AI search engine for Siri as early as March 2026

The long promised Siri LLM upgrade is slated for March, 2026. — Siri will take on Perplexity and OpenAI with its coming revamp. (Picture: Apple)

World Knowledge Answers, as it is known internally, will be a massive upgrade for their voice search assistant Siri, according to Bloomberg.

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.

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Google unveils «nano banana» as a state-of-the-art image generator

Imagination is the limit with Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, which sports better character accuracy across scenes. — Butterfly dress in an NYC scene? No problem with nano banana. (Picture: Google)

After catching buzz on social media, the new generator was uncloaked as Gemini 2.5 Flash Image — and instantly landed on top of the leaderboards.

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.

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Energy spent on Gemini queries down 33x in a year, Google claims

Google claims a stunning reduction in energy use per Gemini query. — Google gets a pretty good measure of energy use per query, since they control the whole process. (Picture: Adobe)

In a Google-commissioned study written by Google personel evaluating Google operations, a new paper finds a stunning reduction of its own environmental impact.

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.

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Friday roundup: Grok spills shares, Meta freezes hiring and AI Mode expands

Grok lists shared chats on Google
If you want to share a chat with friends on Grok, you might get more than you bargained for. According to Forbes, the share-button generates a unique URL that is also shared with search engines, and they found more than 370K stored Grok conversations on Google. OpenAI had a similar problem a few weeks back, and disabled the option. No news yet on mitigation from x.ai.
More at Forbes.

Meta AI enacts hiring freeze as part of reorg
The Wall Street Journal reports that it is part of a wider reorganization of the «Superintelligence» unit, and CNBC reports that it is about «creating a solid structure» for the lab. Apparently, investors have been spooked by the massive expenditures on the unit, after spending big this summer to secure talent. Alexandr Wang, head of the Superintelligence Lab, denies the reports.
More at the WSJ and CNBC.

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Check out this list of all the AI features announced by Google

Lots of new AI capabilities were announced at the Made by Google event. — You can now edit photos just by asking, directly in the app. Plenty of other AI enhancements were announced. (Picture: Google)

While all eyes were on the fancy new hardware announced by Google, they also introduced a slew of new AI features.

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.

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Almost all game developers say AI is reshaping their industry

You'd have a hard time finding a game developer not using AI at this stage. — Almost everyone in the games industry has embraced AI tools. (Picture: Google)

In a new survey of game developers from Google Cloud, 90% of them say they use generative AI in their workflows — and even more (97%) see it as truly transformative.

Further, 90% report that AI is reducing repetitive tasks in their work, and 94% even see it as driving innovation.

The technology has upended «norms in developers’ daily lives and work processes,» the study finds.

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Quick Friday news roundup: Opus 4.1, Grok undresses Taylor Swift, and more

Opus 4.1 is said to be big jump in performance, but doesn't quite reach the top of the pack. — Anthropic’s Opus 4.1 is very close to the state of the art, and many users are claiming it’s way better than 4.0. (Picture: Anthropic)

Anthropic announces Claude Opus 4.1
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.

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Google DeepMind debuts realtime, photorealistic 3D world builder Genie 3

Genie 3 is a real time rendered of realistic 3D worlds - and a step toward AGI. — In Genie 3, the world’s your oyster — and you walk around in it, or mash things up. (Picture: Google DeepMind)

The model creates deeply realistic 3D worlds that you can interact with to «achieve goals,» improve education or just have a fun old time.

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.»

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Google launches Deep Think model with «parallel thinking,» for Ultra users

Google Gemini Deep Think impresses both mathematicians and benchmarks. — Google’s new model thrashes the benchmarks, gets IMO ranked and excels at creativity. (Picture: Screenshot, Google)

This a version similar to the one that won gold in the International Mathematical Olympiad, this time performing at bronze level — a feat no other released model can manage.

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.

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Google bosses want more internal AI use

Google appears to be struggling with internal AI adoption. — Google is looking at ways to increase AI usage internally, while others are miles ahead. (Picture: www.quotecatalog.com, CC BY 2.0)

At an all-hands meeting last week, CEO Sundar Pichai called on employees to get «more efficient» through AI use, rather than hiring more people.

While some Microsoft divisions are making AI use mandatory, and Amazon saying they will reduce headcount due to AI, Google seems to be struggling with uptake.

Only about 50% of users of an internal AI coding tool, Cider, uses the service weekly, writes CNBC.

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