Gemini can now make you thirty seconds of music based on prompts or photos, and will even use Nano Banana for custom art for it.
They say the feature is for fun and games, and very specific music requests that can be personal, like making a tune about your mum’s home cooked plantains.
Continue reading “Google launches custom music generation in Gemini with Lyria 3 model”
If you haven’t caught up yet, Anthropic has sworn off ads and are using their Super Bowl to time decry them.
This has caused a very real spat with OpenAI, and Sam Altman posted a long screed about how Anthropic is misrepresenting how ads will work in ChatGPT.
The headline capex number of $175 to $185 billion is in comparison to a spend of $91 billion in 2025, as their cloud VP, Amin Vahdat, has said they need to double capacity every six months.
In 2026, Meta will spend $135 billion, Microsoft expects a decrease from $37 billion last quarter, and Amazon clocks in at $146 billion, according to CNBC.
Combined, Big Tech looks set to cross $500 billion in AI spending this year, Reuters reports.
As for Google’s AI push, it seems on the rise, having sold 8 million enterprise subscriptions in 2025 and now reaching 750 million monthly active users, up from 650 million last quarter.
Read more: Alphabet’s numbers, writeups at CNBC, Reuters, TechCrunch.
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.
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.
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”
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.
This means they can create 3D worlds from a 2D camera, and it can also calculate the fourth dimension, which is time and movement.
— Anytime we look at the world, we perform an extraordinary feat of memory and prediction. We see and understand things as they are at a given moment in time, as they were a moment ago, and how they are going to be in the moment to follow, Google writes.
Enabling this will be especially useful for training robots, who need spatial real-time awareness about the world around it, and might not have fancy 3D cameras.
The technology is 18x to 300x faster than previous state of the art models, Google says — making the translations function in real-time.
The use case for the technology in addition to robotics is making 3D-models for augmented reality in smart glasses, and in building world models — which is the real advantage on the path to creating world-awareness for Artificial General Intelligence.
Read more: Google’s blog, Launch thread, research paper.
Flow is a wrapper for AI generated videos, using the popular Veo 3.1 — one of the most advanced generators out there.
The expanded access is for Business and Enterprise (9 million users), and Education plans — which has 170 million users.
These plans can now also access the popular Nano Banana Pro service, letting users generate pictures from anything they can imagine.
The Flow service was previously reserved for Gemini Pro and Ultra users, who could generate 8 second, high quality 4K AI videos in widescreen or vertical formats, and daisy chain them for even longer ones.
The service now dwarves OpenAI’s Sora 2 service, which had 6 million total downloads in January 2026.
Read more: The Verge, and Google’s support document.
They might be «just a matter of months» begin Western capabilities, he tells CNBC.
— The question is, can they innovate something new beyond the frontier? So I think they’ve shown they can catch up … and be very close to the frontier … But can they actually innovate something new, like a new transformer … that gets beyond the frontier? I don’t think that’s been shown yet, he tells the new podcast The Tech Download.
The key tech to unlock Chinese AI is access to chips, he says, where the USA is far ahead. The US recently okay’ed exports of the powerful H200 chip from Nvidia, but reception in China has been lukewarm from authorities.
— To invent something is about 100 times harder than it is to copy it, says Hassabis on the podcast. — That’s the next frontier really, and I haven’t seen evidence of that yet, but it’s very difficult.
Read the full scoop on CNBC.
Now you get separate usage limits for the models, so you no longer drain your Pro pool by using the Thinking model or vice versa.
At the same time, Google is upgrading the total limits for the Thinking model to up to 300 prompts per day for the Pro plan, while leaving the Pro model allocation at 100 per day.
Ultra subscribers get 500 daily prompts on the Pro model and 1,500 prompts on the Thinking model.
The upgrade is due to user feedback, writes 9to5Google, quoting Google:
— Many of you want more precision and transparency when deciding which model to use for your daily tasks.
Read more: Google: Rate limits on Gemini, writeups on 9to5Google, Mashable.
Personal Intelligence, launched today, lets Gemini and, later, AI Mode, draw information from Gmail, Google Photos, YouTube and Search history to give you a more «personalized» experience.
Continue reading “Google launches Personal Intelligence, based on trove of data held on people”
The LLM will supposedly function like any other, and be better at things such as scanning your Calendar app for upcoming events and your Contacts for sending messages. It should also be better at providing «emotional support» through «conversational responses» according to a report from paywalled The Information, seen by 9to5Mac.
The Google model will not be in a glass house over at Googleplex, but rather sit on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute servers, and, according to The Information, Apple can choose to ask Google to implement improvements to it, or tinker with the model themselves — thereby evolving it to their particular needs.
Timewise, «some features» will launch already this spring, but others — like remembering past conversations, or things like warning of the weather ahead of an Apple Calendar event, won’t be launching until the WWDC in June, apparently.
Read more: The Information (paywalled), 9to5Mac, AppleInsider — and some choice speculation from The Verge.