Google – Page 3

Google Maps can’t explain why it falsely labeled German autobahns as closed

autobahns, Cars, germany, Google, google maps, GPS, Policy / Beth Washington / May 30, 2025

On Thursday, a Google Maps glitch accidentally made it appear that the most desirable routes on German autobahns and highways were shut down, The Guardian reported.

It remains unclear what unleashed a flood of stop signs on Google Maps in the area just ahead of a four-day holiday break when many drivers had travel plans. Maps of roadways in Belgium and the Netherlands were also affected.

If drivers had stopped to check alternative apps, they would have learned that traffic was flowing normally and may have avoided clogging traffic on alternative routes or wasting time speculating about what could have happened to close so many major roads. Apple Maps and Waze accurately charted traffic patterns, and only Google Maps appeared to be affected.

Instead, Google Maps loyalists learned the hard way that Google doesn’t know everything, as the misinformation reportedly caused traffic jams rather than helping drivers avoid them. Some drivers trusted Google so much that they filed reports with police to investigate the issue, with some worrying that a terrorist attack or government hack may have occurred.

On social media, others vented about what they assumed was correct information about supposed closures, The Guardian reported, with one person fuming, “They can’t have closed ALL the motorways!” Another joked that the Google Maps glitch made it look like the autobahn system was suffering “an acne outbreak.”

Google Maps can’t explain why it falsely labeled German autobahns as closed Read More »

Gemini in Google Drive may finally be useful now that it can analyze videos

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Gemini, Google, Tech / DJ Henderson / May 30, 2025

Google’s rapid adoption of AI has seen the Gemini “sparkle” icon become an omnipresent element in almost every Google product. It’s there to summarize your email, add items to your calendar, and more—if you trust it to do those things. Gemini is also integrated with Google Drive, where it’s gaining a new feature that could make it genuinely useful: Google’s AI bot will soon be able to watch videos stored in your Drive so you don’t have to.

Gemini is already accessible in Drive, with the ability to summarize documents or folders, gather and analyze data, and expand on the topics covered in your documents. Google says the next step is plugging videos into Gemini, saving you from wasting time scrubbing through a file just to find something of interest.

Using a chatbot to analyze and manipulate text doesn’t always make sense—after all, it’s not hard to skim an email or short document. It can take longer to interact with a chatbot, which might not add any useful insights. Video is different because watching is a linear process in which you are presented with information at the pace the video creator sets. You can change playback speed or rewind to catch something you missed, but that’s more arduous than reading something at your own pace. So Gemini’s video support in Drive could save you real time.

Suppose you have a recorded meeting in video form uploaded to Drive. You could go back and rewatch it to take notes or refresh your understanding of a particular exchange. Or, Google suggests, you can ask Gemini to summarize the video and tell you what’s important. This could be a great alternative, as grounding AI output with a specific data set or file tends to make it more accurate. Naturally, you should still maintain healthy skepticism of what the AI tells you about the content of your video.

Gemini in Google Drive may finally be useful now that it can analyze videos Read More »

Google Photos turns 10, celebrates with new AI-infused photo editor

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Google, google photos, Tech / DJ Henderson / May 28, 2025

The current incarnation of Google Photos was not Google’s first image management platform, but it’s been a big success. Ten years on, Google Photos remains one of Google’s most popular products, and it’s getting a couple of new features to celebrate its 10th year in operation. You’ll be able to share albums a bit more easily, and editing tools are getting a boost with, you guessed it, AI.

Google Photos made a splash in 2015 when it broke free of the spiraling Google+ social network, offering people supposedly unlimited free storage for compressed images. Of course, that was too good to last. In 2021, Google began limiting photo uploads to 15GB for free users, sharing the default account level storage with other services like Gmail and Drive. Today, Google encourages everyone to pay for a Google One subscription to get more space, which is a bit of a bummer. Regardless, people still use Google Photos extensively.

According to the company, Photos has more than 1.5 billion monthly users, and it stores more than 9 trillion photos and videos. When using the Photos app on a phone, you are prompted to automatically upload your camera roll, which makes it easy to keep all your memories backed up (and edge ever closer to the free storage limit). Photos has also long offered almost magical search capabilities, allowing you to search for the content of images to find them. That may seem less impressive now, but it was revolutionary a decade ago. Google says users perform over 370 million searches in Photos each month.

An AI anniversary

Google is locked in with AI as it reimagines most of its products and services with Gemini. As it refreshes Photos for its 10th anniversary, the editor is getting a fresh dose of AI. And this may end up one of Google’s most used AI features—more than 210 million images are edited in Photos every month.

Google Photos turns 10, celebrates with new AI-infused photo editor Read More »

Google Home is getting deeper Gemini integration and a new widget

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Google, Smart Home, Tech / Kelly Newman / May 24, 2025

As Google moves the last remaining Nest devices into the Home app, it’s also looking at ways to make this smart home hub easier to use. Naturally, Google is doing that by ramping up Gemini integration. The company has announced new automation capabilities with generative AI, as well as better support for third-party devices via the Home API. Google AI will also plug into a new Android widget that can keep you updated on what the smart parts of your home are up to.

The Google Home app is where you interact with all of Google’s smart home gadgets, like cameras, thermostats, and smoke detectors—some of which have been discontinued, but that’s another story. It also accommodates smart home devices from other companies, which can make managing a mixed setup feasible if not exactly intuitive. A dash of AI might actually help here.

Google began testing Gemini integrations in Home last year, and now it’s opening that up to third-party devices via the Home API. Google has worked with a few partners on API integrations before general availability. The previously announced First Alert smoke/carbon monoxide detector and Yale smart lock that are replacing Google’s Nest devices are among the first, along with Cync lighting, Motorola Tags, and iRobot vacuums.

Google Home is getting deeper Gemini integration and a new widget Read More »

Google’s Will Smith double is better at eating AI spaghetti … but it’s crunchy?

AI, Ai video generator, Biz & IT, Deepfakes, Google, Google Veo, machine learning, Spaghetti, Veo, Veo 3, video synthesis, will smith / 9u50fv / May 24, 2025

On Tuesday, Google launched Veo 3, a new AI video synthesis model that can do something no major AI video generator has been able to do before: create a synchronized audio track. While from 2022 to 2024, we saw early steps in AI video generation, each video was silent and usually very short in duration. Now you can hear voices, dialog, and sound effects in eight-second high-definition video clips.

Shortly after the new launch, people began asking the most obvious benchmarking question: How good is Veo 3 at faking Oscar-winning actor Will Smith at eating spaghetti?

First, a brief recap. The spaghetti benchmark in AI video traces its origins back to March 2023, when we first covered an early example of horrific AI-generated video using an open source video synthesis model called ModelScope. The spaghetti example later became well-known enough that Smith parodied it almost a year later in February 2024.

Here’s what the original viral video looked like:

One thing people forget is that at the time, the Smith example wasn’t the best AI video generator out there—a video synthesis model called Gen-2 from Runway had already achieved superior results (though it was not yet publicly accessible). But the ModelScope result was funny and weird enough to stick in people’s memories as an early poor example of video synthesis, handy for future comparisons as AI models progressed.

AI app developer Javi Lopez first came to the rescue for curious spaghetti fans earlier this week with Veo 3, performing the Smith test and posting the results on X. But as you’ll notice below when you watch, the soundtrack has a curious quality: The faux Smith appears to be crunching on the spaghetti.

On X, Javi Lopez ran “Will Smith eating spaghetti” in Google’s Veo 3 AI video generator and received this result.

It’s a glitch in Veo 3’s experimental ability to apply sound effects to video, likely because the training data used to create Google’s AI models featured many examples of chewing mouths with crunching sound effects. Generative AI models are pattern-matching prediction machines, and they need to be shown enough examples of various types of media to generate convincing new outputs. If a concept is over-represented or under-represented in the training data, you’ll see unusual generation results, such as jabberwockies.

Google’s Will Smith double is better at eating AI spaghetti … but it’s crunchy? Read More »

Google I/O Day

Google / Mike M. / May 22, 2025

What did Google announce on I/O day? Quite a lot of things. Many of them were genuinely impressive. Google is secretly killing it on the actual technology front.

Logan Kilpatrick (DeepMind): Google’s progress in AI since last year:

– The worlds strongest models, on pareto frontier

– Gemini app: has over 400M monthly active users

– We now process 480T tokens a month, up 50x YoY

– Over 7M developers have built with the Gemini API (4x)

Much more to come still!

I think? It’s so hard to keep track. There’s really a lot going on right now, not that most people would have any idea. Instead of being able to deal with all these exciting things, I’m scrambling to get to it all at once.

Google AI: We covered a LOT of ground today. Fortunately, our friends at @NotebookLM put all of today’s news and keynotes into a notebook. This way, you can listen to an audio overview, create a summary, or even view a Mind Map of everything from #GoogleIO 2025.

That’s actually a terrible mind map, it’s missing about half of the things.

As in, you follow their CEO’s link to a page that tells you everything that happened, and it’s literally a link bank to 27 other articles. I did not realize one could fail marketing forever this hard, and this badly. I have remarkably little idea, given how much effort I am willing to put into finding out, what their products can do.

The market seems impressed, with Google outperforming, although the timing of it all was a little weird. I continue to be deeply confused about what the market is expecting, or rather not expecting, out of Google.

Ben Thompson has a gated summary post, Reuters has a summary as well.

I share Ben’s feeling that I’m coming away less impressed than I should be, because so many things were lost in the shuffle. There’s too much stuff here. Don’t announce everything at once like this if you want us to pay attention. And he’s right to worry that it’s not clear that Google, despite doing all the things, can develop compelling products.

I do think it can, though. And I think it’s exactly right to currently produce a bunch of prototypical not-yet-compelling products that aren’t compelling because they aren’t good enough yet… and then later make them good enough.

Except that you need people to actually then, you know, realize the products exist.

This post covers what I could figure out on a deadline. As for why I didn’t simply give this a few more days, well, I had a reason.

Or the ‘too many announcements, lost track.’

Google announced:

Veo 3, which generates amazing eight second videos now with talk and sound.
Flow, designed to tie that into longer stuff, but that doesn’t work right yet.
Various new GMail and related integrations and other ways to spread context.
Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Gemini 2.5 Pro Deep Thinking. They’re good, probably.
Gemma 3n, open source runs on phones with 2GB ram.
Gemini Diffusion as a text model, very intriguing but needs work.
Jules, their answer to Codex, available for free.
They’re going to let you go Full Agent, in Agent Mode, in several places.
Gemini using your open tabs as context, available natively in Chrome.
AI Search, for everyone, for free, as a search option, including a future agent mode and a specialized shopping mode.
Automatic smooth translation for real-time talk including copying tone.
A weird Google Beam thing where you see people in 3D while talking.
They did an Android XR demo, but it’s going to be a while.
For now you use your phone camera for a full Google Live experience, it’s good.
Their new premium AI subscription service is $250/month.

A lot of it is available now, some of it will be a few months. Some of it is free, some of it isn’t, or isn’t after a sample. Some of it is clearly good, some is still buggy, some we don’t know yet. It’s complicated.

Also I think there was a day two?

The offering that got everyone excited and went viral was Veo 3.

They also updated their image generation to Imagen 4 and it’s up to 2k resolution with various improvements and lots of ability to control details. It’s probably pretty good but frankly no one cares.

Did you want an eight second AI video, now with sound, maybe as something you could even extend? They got you. We can talk (cool video). Oh, being able to talk but having nothing to say.

Sundar Pichai (CEO Google): Veo 3, our SOTA video generation model, has native audio generation and is absolutely mindblowing.

For filmmakers + creatives, we’re combining the best of Veo, Imagen and Gemini into a new filmmaking tool called Flow.

Ready today for Google AI Pro and Ultra plan subscribers.

People really love the new non-silent video generation capabilities.

Here’s Bayram Annakov having a guy wake up in a cold sweat. Here’s Google sharing a user extending a video of an eagle carrying a car. Here’s fofr making a man run while advertising replicate, which almost works, and also two talking muffins which totally worked. Here’s Pliny admiring the instruction handling.

And here’s Pliny somewhat jailbreaking it, with videos to show for it. Except, um, Google, why do any of these require jailbreaks? They’re just cool eight second videos. Are they a little NSFW? I mean sure, but we’re strictly (if aggressively) PG-13 here, complete with exactly one F-bomb. I realize this is a negotiation, I realize why we might not want to go to R, but I think refusing to make any of these is rather shameful behavior.

I would say that Flow plus Veo 3 is the first video generation product that makes me think ‘huh, actually that’s starting to be cool.’ Coherence is very strong, you have a lot of tools at your disposal, and sound is huge. They’re going to give you the power to do various shots and virtual camera movements.

I can see actually using this, or something not too different from this. Or I can see someone like Primordial Soup Labs, which formed a partnership with DeepMind, creating an actually worthwhile short film.

Steven McCulloch: Veo 3 has blown past a new threshold of capability, with the ability to one-shot scenes with full lip sync and background audio. What used to be a 4-step workflow with high barrier to entry has been boiled down into a single, frictionless prompt.

This is huge.

They also refer to their music sandbox, powered by Lyria 2, but there’s nothing to announce at this time.

They’re launching SynthID Detector, a tool to detect AI-generated content.

They remind us of Google Vids to turn your slides into videos, please no. Don’t. They’re also offering AI avatars in Vids. Again, please, don’t, what fresh hell is this.

Also there’s Stitch to generate designs and UIs from text prompts?

I keep waiting for it, it keeps not arriving, is it finally happening soon?

Sundar Pichai: With personal smart replies in Gmail, you can give Gemini permission to pull in details from across your Google apps and write in a way that sounds like you.

Rolling out in the coming weeks to subscribers.

I’ve been disappointed too many times at this point, so I will believe it when I see it.

The part that I want most is the pulling in of the details, the ability to have the AI keep track of and remind me of the relevant context, including pulling from Google Drive which in turn means you can for example pull from Obsidian since it’s synced up. They’re also offering ‘source-grounded writing help’ next quarter in Google Docs (but not GMail?) where you have it pull only from particular sources, which is nice if it’s easy enough to use.

I want GMail to properly populate Calendar rather than its current laughably silly hit-and-miss actions (oh look, at movie that runs from 3-4 on Thursday, that’s how that works!), to pull out and make sure I don’t miss key information, to remind me of dropped balls and so on.

They’re offering exactly this with ‘inbox cleanup,’ as in ‘delete all of my unread emails from The Groomed Paw from the last year.’ That’s a first step. We need to kick that up at least a notch, starting with things such as ‘set up an AI filter so I never see another damned Groomed Paw email again unless it seems actually urgent or offers a 50% or bigger sale’ and ‘if Sarah tells me if she’s coming on Friday ping me right away.’

Another offering that sounds great is ‘fast appointment scheduling integrated into GMail,’ in the video it’s a simple two clicks which presumably implies you’ve set things up a lot already. Again, great if it works, but it has to really work and know your preferences and adjust to your existing schedule. If it also reads your other emails and other context to include things not strictly in your calendar, now we’re really talking.

Do I want it to write the actual emails after that? I mean, I guess, sometimes, if it’s good enough. Funnily enough, when that happens, that’s probably exactly the times I don’t want it to sound like me. If I wanted to sound like me I could just write the email. The reason I want the AI to write it is because I need to be Performing Class, or I want to sound like a Dangerous Professional a la Patio11, or I want to do a polite formality. Or when I mostly need to populate the email with a bunch of information.

Of course, if it gets good enough, I’ll also want it to do some ‘sound like me’ work too, such as responding to readers asking questions with known answers. Details are going to matter a ton, and I would have so many notes if I felt someone was listening.

In any case, please, I would love a version of this that’s actually good in those other ways. Are the existing products good enough I should be using them? I don’t know. If there’s one you use that you think I’d want, share in the comments.

I/O Day mostly wasn’t about the actual models or the API, but we do have some incremental changes here thrown into the fray.

Gemini 2.5 Flash is technically still in preview, but it’s widely available including in the Gemini app, and I’d treat it as de facto released. It’s probably the best fast and cheap model, and the best ‘fast thinking’ model if you use that mode.

Also, yes, of course Pliny pwned it, why do we even ask, if you want to use it you set it as the system prompt.

Pliny: ah forgot to mention, prompt is designed to be set as system prompt. a simple obfuscation of any trigger words in your query should be plenty, like “m-d-m-a” rather than “mdma”

Sundar Pichai (CEO Google): Our newest Gemini 2.5 Flash is better on nearly every dimension: reasoning, multimodality, code, long context. Available for preview in the Gemini app, AI Studio and Vertex AI.

And with Deep Think mode, Gemini 2.5 Pro is getting better, too. Available to trusted testers.

Demis Hassabis: Gemini 2.5 Flash is an amazing model for its speed and low-cost.

Logan Kilpatrick: Gemini 2.5 Flash continues to push the pareto frontier, so much intelligence packed into this model, can’t wait for GA in a few weeks!

Peter Wildeford: LLMs are like parrots except the parrots are very good at math

On that last one, the light blue is Deep Thinking, dark blue is regular 2.5 Pro.

Peter Wildeford: It’s pretty confusing that the graphs compare “Gemini 2.5 Pro” to “Gemini 2.5 Pro”

Alex Friedland: The fundamental issue is that numbers are limited and they might run out.

Gemini 2.5 Flash is in second place on (what’s left of) the Arena leaderboard, behind only Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Hasan Can: I wasn’t going to say this at first, because every time I praised one of Google’s models, they ruined it within a few weeks but the new G.2.5 Flash is actually better than the current 2.5 Pro in the Gemini app. It reminds me of the intelligence of the older 2.5 Pro from 03.25.

The Live API will now have audio-visual input and native audio out dialogue with ability to steer tone, accent and style off speaking, ability to respond to user tone of voice, as well as tool use. They’re also adding computer use to the API, and are adding native SDK support for Model Context Protocol (MCP).

There’s a white paper on how they made Gemini secure, and their safeguards, but today is a day that I have sympathy for the ‘we don’t have time for that’ crowd and I’m setting it aside for later. I’ll circle back.

Gemma 3n seems to be a substantial improvement in Google’s open model on-device performance. I don’t know whether it is better than other open alternatives, there’s always a bizarre ocean of different models claiming to be good, but I would be entirely unsurprised if this was very much state of the art.

Google AI Developers: Introducing Gemma 3n, available in early preview today.

The model uses a cutting-edge architecture optimized for mobile on-device usage. It brings multimodality, super fast inference, and more.

Key features include:

-Expanded multimodal understanding with video and audio input, alongside text and images

-Developer-friendly sizes: 4B and 2B (and many in between!)

-Optimized on-device efficiency for 1.5x faster response on mobile compared to Gemma 3 4B

Build live, interactive apps and sophisticated audio-centric experiences, including real-time speech transcription, translation, and rich voice-driven interactions

…

Gemma 3n leverages a Google DeepMind innovation called Per-Layer Embeddings (PLE) that delivers a significant reduction in RAM usage. While the raw parameter count is 5B and 8B, this innovation allows you to run larger models on mobile devices or live-stream from the cloud, with a memory overhead comparable to a 2B and 4B model, meaning the models can operate with a dynamic memory footprint of just 2GB and 3GB. Learn more in our documentation.

Oh, and also they just added MedGemma for health care, SignGemma for ASL and DolphinGemma for talking to dolphins. Because sure, why not?

This quietly seems like it could turn out to be a really big deal. We have an actually interesting text diffusion model. It can do 2k tokens/second.

Alexander Doria: Gemini Diffusion does pass honorably my nearly impossible OCR correction benchmark: Plainly, “can you correct the OCR of this text.”

Meanwhile, here’s a cool finding, ‘what like it’s hard’ department:

Earlence: Gemini diffusion is cool! Really fast and appears capable in coding tasks. But what is interesting is that one of @elder_plinius jailbreaks (for 2.5) appears to have worked on the diffusion model as well when I used it to ask about Anthrax.

Remember when I spent a day covering OpenAI’s Codex?

Well, Google announced Jules, its own AI coding agent. Context-aware, repo-integrated, ready to ship features. The quick video looks like a superior UI. But how good is it? So far I haven’t seen much feedback on that.

So instead of a detailed examination, that’s all I have for you on this right now. Jules exists, it’s Google’s answer to Codex, we’ll have to see if it is good.

But, twist! It’s free. Right now it’s reporting heavy use (not a shock) so high latency.

In addition to incorporating Gemini 2.5, Deep Research will soon let you connect your Google Drive and GMail, choose particular sources, and integrate with Canvas.

This is pretty exciting – in general any way to get deep dives to use your extensive context properly is a big game and Google is very good with long context.

If you don’t want to wait for Deep Research, you can always Deep Think instead. Well, not yet unless you’re a safety researcher (and if you are, hit them up!) but soon.

JJ Hughes notes how exciting it will be to get true long context into a top level deep reasoning model to unlock new capabilities such as for lawyers like himself, but notes the UI remains terrible for this.

Also, remember NotebookLM? There’s now An App For That and it’s doing well.

Google Search AI Overviews have been a bit of a joke for a while. They’re the most common place people interact with AI, and yet they famously make obvious stupid mistakes, including potentially harmful ones, constantly. That’s been improving, and now with 2.5 powering them it’s going to improve again.

AI Mode is going to be (future tense because it’s not there for me yet) something different from Overviews, but one might ask isn’t it the same as using Gemini? What’s the difference? Is this a version of Perplexity (which has fallen totally out of my rotation), or what?

They’re doing a terrible job explaining any of that, OpenAI is perhaps secretly not the worst namer of AI services.

Sundar Pichai: AI Mode is rolling out to everyone in the US. It’s a total reimagining of Search with more advanced reasoning so you can ask longer, complex queries.

AI Overviews are now used by 1.5B people a month, in 200+ countries and territories.

And Gemini 2.5 is coming to both this week.

My understanding is that the difference is that AI Mode in search will have better integrations for various real time information systems, especially shopping and other commonly accessed knowledge, and has the ability to do a lot of Google searches quickly to generate its context, and also it is free.

They plan on merging ‘Project Mariner’ or ‘Agent Mode’ into it as well, and you’ll have the option to do a ‘deep search.’ They say they’re starting with ‘event tickets, restaurant reservations and local appointments.’ I actually think this is The Way. You don’t try to deploy an agent in general. It’s not time for that yet. You deploy an agent in specific ways where you know it works, on a whitelisted set of websites where you know what it’s doing and that this is safe. You almost don’t notice there’s an agent involved, it feels like using the Web but increasingly without the extra steps.

If they do a decent job of all this, ‘Google Search AI Mode’ is going to be the actually most useful way to do quite a lot of AI things. It won’t be good for jobs that require strong intelligence, but a large percentage of tasks are much more about search. Google has a huge edge there if they execute, including in customization.

They also plan to incorporate AI Search Mode advances directly into regular Google Search, at least in the overviews and I think elsewhere as well.

What I worry about here is it feels like multiple teams fighting over AI turf. The AI Search team is trying to do things that ‘naturally’ fall to Gemini and also to regular Search, and Gemini is trying to do its own form of search, and who knows what the Overviews team is thinking, and so on.

An important special case for Google Search AI Mode (beware, your computer might be accessing GSAM?) will (in a few months) be Shopping With Google AI Mode, I don’t even know what to call anything anymore. Can I call it Google Shopping? Gemini Shopping?

It actually seems really cool, again if executed well, allowing you to search all the sites at once in an AI-powered way, giving you visuals, asking follow ups. It can track prices and then automatically buy when the price is right.

They have a ‘try it on’ that lets you picture yourself in any of the clothing, which is rolling out now to search labs. Neat. It’s double neat if it automatically only shows you clothing that fits you.

Sundar Pichai (CEO Google): Agent Mode in the @Geminiapp can help you get more done across the web – coming to subscribers soon.

Plus a new multi-tasking version of Project Mariner is now available to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US, and computer use capabilities are coming to the Gemini API.

It will also use MCP, which enshrines MCP as a standard across labs.

The example here is to use ‘agent mode’ to find and go through apartment listings and arrange tours. They say they’re bringing this mode to the Gemini app and planning on incorporating it into Chrome.

I like the idea of their feature ‘teach and repeat.’ As in, you do a task once, and it learns from what you did so it can do similar tasks for you in the future.

Alas, early reports are that Project Mariner is not ready for prime time.

As an example, Bayram Annakov notes it failed on a simple task. That seems to be the norm.

You now can get this for free in Android and iOS, which means sharing live camera feeds while you talk to Gemini and it talks back, now including things like doing Google searches on your behalf, calling up YouTube videos and so on, even making its own phone calls.

I’m not even sure what exactly Project Astra is at this point. I’ve been assuming I’ve been using it when I put Gemini into live video mode, so now it’s simply Google Live, but I’m never quite sure?

Roward Cheung: [Google] revamped project Astra with native audio dialogue, UI control, content retrieval, calling, and shopping.

The official video he includes highlights YouTube search, GMail integration and the ability to have Gemini call a shop (in the background while you keep working) and ask what they have in stock. They’re calling it ‘action intelligence.’

In another area they talk about extending Google Live and Project Astra into search. They’re framing this as you point the camera at something and then you talk and it generates a search, including showing you search results traditional Google style. So it’s at least new in that it can make that change.

If you want to really unlock the power of seeing your screen, you want the screen to see what you see. Thus, Android XR Glasses. That’s a super exciting idea and a long time coming. And we have a controlled demo.

But also, not so fast. We’re talking 2026 at the earliest, probably 18+ months, and we have no idea what they are going to cost. I also got strong ‘not ready for prime time’ vibes from the demo, more of the ‘this is cool in theory but won’t work in practice.’ My guess is that if I had these in current form, I’d almost entirely use them for Google Live purposes and maybe chatting with the AI, and basically nothing else, unless we got better agentic AI that could work with various phone apps?

There’s another new feature where you can open up Gemini in Chrome and ask questions not only about the page, but all your other open pages, which automatically are put into context. It’s one of those long time coming ideas, again if it works well. This one should be available by now.

This is one of many cases where it’s going to take getting used to it so you actually think to use it when this is the right modality, and you have confidence to turn to it, but if so, seems great.

It’s hard to tell how good translation is from a sample video, but I find it credible that this is approaching perfect and means you can pull off free-flowing conversations across languages, as long as you don’t mind a little being lost in translation. They’re claiming they are preserving things like tone of voice.

Sundar Pichai: Real-time speech translation directly in Google Meet matches your tone and pattern so you can have free-flowing conversations across languages

Launching now for subscribers. ¡Es mágico!

Rob Haisfield: Now imagine this with two people wearing AR glasses in person!

They show this in combination with their 3D conferencing platform Google Beam, but the two don’t seem at all related. Translation is for audio, two dimensions are already two more than you need.

Relatedly, Gemini is offering to do automatic transcripts including doing ‘transcript trim’ to get rid of filler words, or one-click balancing your video’s sound.

They’re calling it Google Beam, downwind of Project Starline.

This sounds like it is primarily about 3D video conferencing or some form of AR/VR, or letting people move hands and such around like they’re interacting in person?

Sundar Pichai: Google Beam uses a new video model to transform 2D video streams into a realistic 3D experience — with near perfect headtracking, down to the millimeter, and at 60 frames per second, all in real-time.

The result is an immersive conversational experience. HP will share more soon.

It looks like this isn’t based on the feed from one camera, but rather six, and requires its own unique devices.

This feels like a corporate ‘now with real human physical interactions, fellow humans!’ moment. It’s not that you couldn’t turn it into something cool, but I think you’d have to take it pretty far, and by that I mean I think you’d need haptics. If I can at least shake your hand or hug you, maybe we’ve got something. Go beyond that and the market is obvious.

Whereas the way they’re showing it seems to me to be the type of uncanny valley situation I very much Do Not Want. Why would actually want this for a meeting, either of two people or more than two? I’ve never understood why you would want to have a ‘virtual meeting’ where people were moving in 3D in virtual chairs, or you seemed to be moving in space, it seems like not having to navigate that is one of the ways Google Meet is better than in person.

I can see it if you were using it to do something akin to a shared VR space, or a game, or an intentionally designed viewing experience including potentially watching a sporting event. But for the purposes they are showing off, 2D isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

On top of that, this won’t be cheap. We’re likely talking $15k-$30k per unit at first for the early devices from HP that you’ll need. Hard pass. But even Google admits the hardware devices aren’t really the point. The point is that you can beam something in one-to-many mode, anywhere in the world, once they figure out what to do with that.

Google’s AI use is growing fast. Really fast.

Sundar Pichai: The world is adopting AI faster than ever before.

This time last year we were processing 9.7 trillion tokens a month across our products and APIs.

Today, that number is 480 trillion. That’s a 50X increase in just a year. 🤯

Gallabytes: I wonder how this breaks down flash versus pro

Peter Wildeford: pinpoint the exact moment Gemini became good

I had Claude estimate similar numbers for other top AI labs. At this point Claude thinks Google is probably roughly on par with OpenAI on tokens processed, and well ahead of everyone else.

But of course you can get a lot of tokens when you throw your AI into every Google search whether the user likes it or not. So the more meaningful number is likely the 400 million monthly active users for Gemini, with usage up 45% in the 2.5 era, but again I don’t think the numbers for different services are all that comparable, but note that ChatGPT’s monthly user count is 1.5 billion, about half of whom use it any given week. The other half have to be some strange weeks, given most of them aren’t exactly switching over to Claude.

Google offers a lot of things for free. That will also be true in AI. In particular, AI Search will stay free, as will basic functionality in the Gemini app. But if you want to take full advantage, yep, you’re going to pay.

They have two plans: The Pro plan at $20/month, and the Ultra plan at $250/month, which includes early access to new features including Agent Mode and much higher rate limits. This is their Ultra pitch.

Hensen Juang: Wait they are bundling YouTube premium?

MuffinV: At this point they will sell every google product as a single subscription.

Hensen Juang: This is the way.

It is indeed The Way. Give me the meta subscription. Google Prime.

For most people, the Pro plan looks like it will suffice. Given everything Google is offering, a lot of you should be giving up your $20/month, even if that’s your third $20/month after Claude and ChatGPT. The free plan is actually pretty solid too, if you’re not going to be that heavy a user because you’re also using the competition.

The $250/month Ultra plan seems like it’s not offering that much extra. The higher rate limits are nice but you probably won’t run into them often. The early access is nice, but the early access products are mostly rough around the edges. It certainly isn’t going to be ‘ten times better,’ and it’s a much worse ‘deal’ than the Pro $20/month plan. But once again, looking at relative prices is a mistake. They don’t matter.

What matters is absolute price versus absolute benefit. If you’re actually getting good use out of the extra stuff, it can easily be well in excess of the $250/month.

If your focus is video, fofr reports you get 12k credits per month, and it costs 150 credits per 8 second Veo 3 video, so with perfect utilization you pay $0.39 per second of video, plus you get the other features. A better deal, if you only want video, is to buy the credits directly, at about $0.19 per second. That’s still not cheap, but it’s a lot better, and this does seem like a big quality jump.

Another key question is, how many iterations does it take to get what you want? That’s a huge determinant of real cost. $0.19 per second is nothing if it always spits out the final product.

For now I don’t see the $250/month being worth it for most people, especially without Project Mariner access. And as JJ Hughes says, add up all these top level subscriptions and pretty soon you’re talking real money. But I’d keep an eye.

Knud Berthelsen: There is so much and you know they will eventually integrate it in their products that actually have users. There needs to be something between the $20/month tier and the $250 for those of us who want an AI agent but not a movie studio.

It’s a lot. Google is pushing ahead on all the fronts at once. The underlying models are excellent. They’re making it rain. It’s all very disjointed, and the vision hasn’t been realized, but there’s tons of potential here.

Pliny: Ok @GoogleDeepMind, almost there. If you can build a kick-ass agentic UI to unify everything and write a half-decent system prompt, people will call it AGI.

Justin Halford: They’re clearly the leading lab at this point.

Askwho: Veo 3’s hyped high-fidelity videos w/ sound are dazzling, but still feel like an advanced toy. Gemini Diffusion shows immense promise, though its current form is weak. Jules is tough to assess fully due to rate limits, but it’s probably the most impactful due to wide availability

Some people will call o3 AGI. I have little doubt some (more) people would call Google Gemini AGI if you made everything involved work as its best self and unified it all.

I wouldn’t be one of those people. Not yet. But yeah, interesting times.

Demis Hassabis does say that unification is the vision, to turn the Gemini app into a universal AI assistant, including combining Google Live for real time vision with Project Mariner for up to ten parallel agent actions.

Ben Thompson came away from all this thinking that the only real ‘products’ here were still Google search and Google Cloud, and that remains the only products that truly matter or function at Google. I get why one would come away with that impression, but again I don’t agree. I think that the other offerings won’t all hit, especially at first, but they’ll get better quickly as AI advances and as the productization and iterations fly by.

He has some great turns of phrase. Here, Ben points out that the problem with AI is that to use it well you have to think and figure out what to do. And if there’s one thing users tend to lack, it would be volition. Until Google can solve volition, the product space will largely go to those who do solve it, which often means startups.

Ben Thompson: Second, the degree to which so many of the demoes yesterday depend on user volition actually kind of dampened my enthusiasm for their usefulness.

It has long been the case that the best way to bring products to the consumer market is via devices, and that seems truer than ever: Android is probably going to be the most important canvas for shipping a lot of these capabilities, and Google’s XR glasses were pretty compelling (and, in my opinion, had a UX much closer to what I envision for XR than Meta’s Orion did).

Devices drive usage at scale, but that actually leaves a lot of room for startups to build software products that incorporate AI to solve problems that people didn’t know they had; the challenge will be in reaching them, which is to say the startup problem is the same as ever.

…

Google is doing a good job at making Search better; I see no reason to be worried about them making any other great product, even as the possibility of making something great with their models seems higher than ever. That’s good for startups!

I’m excited for it rather than worried, but yes, if you’re a startup, I would worry a bit.

What will we see tomorrow?

Discussion about this post

Google I/O Day Read More »

Gemini 2.5 is leaving preview just in time for Google’s new $250 AI subscription

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Gemini, Google, Tech / 9u50fv / May 21, 2025

Deep Think graphs I/O — Deep Think is more capable of complex math and coding. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

Both 2.5 models have adjustable thinking budgets when used in Vertex AI and via the API, and now the models will also include summaries of the “thinking” process for each output. This makes a little progress toward making generative AI less overwhelmingly expensive to run. Gemini 2.5 Pro will also appear in some of Google’s dev products, including Gemini Code Assist.

Gemini Live, previously known as Project Astra, started to appear on mobile devices over the last few months. Initially, you needed to have a Gemini subscription or a Pixel phone to access Gemini Live, but now it’s coming to all Android and iOS devices immediately. Google demoed a future “agentic” capability in the Gemini app that can actually control your phone, search the web for files, open apps, and make calls. It’s perhaps a little aspirational, just like the Astra demo from last year. The version of Gemini Live we got wasn’t as good, but as a glimpse of the future, it was impressive.

There are also some developments in Chrome, and you guessed it, it’s getting Gemini. It’s not dissimilar from what you get in Edge with Copilot. There’s a little Gemini icon in the corner of the browser, which you can click to access Google’s chatbot. You can ask it about the pages you’re browsing, have it summarize those pages, and ask follow-up questions.

Google AI Ultra is ultra-expensive

Since launching Gemini, Google has only had a single $20 monthly plan for AI features. That plan granted you access to the Pro models and early versions of Google’s upcoming AI. At I/O, Google is catching up to AI firms like OpenAI, which have offered sky-high AI plans. Google’s new Google AI Ultra plan will cost $250 per month, more than the $200 plan for ChatGPT Pro.

Gemini 2.5 is leaving preview just in time for Google’s new $250 AI subscription Read More »

Zero-click searches: Google’s AI tools are the culmination of its hubris

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Features, Google, search / Mike M. / May 20, 2025

Google’s first year with AI search was a wild ride. It will get wilder.

Google is constantly making changes to its search rankings, but not all updates are equal. Every few months, the company bundles up changes into a larger “core update.” These updates make rapid and profound changes to search, so website operators watch them closely.

The March 2024 update was unique. It was one of Google’s largest core updates ever, and it took over a month to fully roll out. Nothing has felt quite the same since. Whether the update was good or bad depends on who you ask—and maybe who you are.

It’s common for websites to see traffic changes after a core update, but the impact of the March 2024 update marked a seismic shift. Google says the update aimed to address spam and AI-generated content in a meaningful way. Still, many publishers say they saw clicks on legitimate sites evaporate, while others have had to cope with unprecedented volatility in their traffic. Because Google owns almost the entire search market, changes in its algorithm can move the Internet itself.

In hindsight, the March 2024 update looks like the first major Google algorithm update for the AI era. Not only did it (supposedly) veer away from ranking AI-authored content online, but it also laid the groundwork for Google’s ambitious—and often annoying—desire to fuse AI with search.

A year ago, this ambition surfaced with AI Overviews, but now the company is taking an even more audacious route, layering in a new chat-based answer service called “AI Mode.” Both of these technologies do at least two things: They aim to keep you on Google properties longer, and they remix publisher content without always giving prominent citations.

Smaller publishers appear to have borne the brunt of the changes caused by these updates. “Google got all this flak for crushing the small publishers, and it’s true that when they make these changes, they do crush a lot of publishers,” says Jim Yu, CEO of enterprise SEO platform BrightEdge. Yu explains that Google is the only search engine likely to surface niche content in the first place, and there are bound to be changes to sites at the fringes during a major core update.

Google’s own view on the impact of the March 2024 update is unsurprisingly positive. The company said it was hoping to reduce the appearance of unhelpful content in its search engine results pages (SERPs) by 40 percent. After the update, the company claimed an actual reduction of closer to 45 percent. But does it feel like Google’s results have improved by that much? Most people don’t think so.

What causes this disconnect? According to Michael King, founder of SEO firm iPullRank, we’re not speaking the same language as Google. “Google’s internal success metrics differ from user perceptions,” he says. “Google measures user satisfaction through quantifiable metrics, while external observers rely on subjective experiences.”

Google evaluates algorithm changes with various tests, including human search quality testers and running A/B tests on live searches. But more than anything else, success is about the total number of searches (5 trillion of them per year). Google often makes this number a centerpiece of its business updates to show investors that it can still grow.

However, using search quantity to measure quality has obvious problems. For instance, more engagement with a search engine might mean that quality has decreased, so people try new queries (e.g., the old trick of adding “Reddit” to the end of your search string). In other words, people could be searching more because they don’t like the results.

Jim Yu suggests that Google is moving fast and breaking things, but it may not be as bad as we think. “I think they rolled things out faster because they had to move a lot faster than they’ve historically had to move, and it ends up that they do make some real mistakes,” says Yu. “[Google] is held to a higher standard, but by and large, I think their search quality is improving.”

According to King, Google’s current search behavior still favors big names, but other sites have started to see a rebound. “Larger brands are performing better in the top three positions, while lesser-known websites have gained ground in positions 4 through 10,” says King. “Although some websites have indeed lost traffic due to reduced organic visibility, the bigger issue seems tied to increased usage of AI Overviews”—and now the launch of AI Mode.

Yes, the specter of AI hangs over every SERP. The unhelpful vibe many people now get from Google searches, regardless of the internal metrics the company may use, may come from a fundamental shift in how Google surfaces information in the age of AI.

The AI Overview hangover

In 2025, you can’t talk about Google’s changes to search without acknowledging the AI-generated elephant in the room. As it wrapped up that hefty core update in March 2024, Google also announced a major expansion of AI in search, moving the “Search Generative Experience” out of labs and onto Google.com. The feature was dubbed “AI Overviews.”

The AI Overview box has been a fixture on Google’s search results page ever since its debut a year ago. The feature uses the same foundational AI model as Google’s Gemini chatbot to formulate answers to your search queries by ingesting the top 100 (!) search results. It sits at the top of the page, pushing so-called blue link content even farther down below the ads and knowledge graph content. It doesn’t launch on every query, and sometimes it answers questions you didn’t ask—or even hallucinates a totally wrong answer.

And it’s not without some irony that Google’s laudable decision to de-rank synthetic AI slop comes at the same time that Google heavily promotes its own AI-generated content right at the top of SERPs.

AI Overview on phone — AI Overviews appear right at the top of many search results. Credit: Google

What is Google getting for all of this AI work? More eyeballs, it would seem. “AI is driving more engagement than ever before on Google,” says Yu. BrightEdge data shows that impressions on Google are up nearly 50 percent since AI Overviews launched. Many of the opinions you hear about AI Overviews online are strongly negative, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t paying attention to the feature. In its Q1 2025 earnings report, Google announced that AI Overviews is being “used” by 1.5 billion people every month. (Since you can’t easily opt in or opt out of AI Overviews, this “usage” claim should be taken with a grain of salt.)

Interestingly, the impact of AI Overviews has varied across the web. In October 2024, Google was so pleased with AI Overviews that it expanded them to appear in more queries. And as AI crept into more queries, publishers saw a corresponding traffic drop. Yu estimates this drop to be around 30 percent on average for those with high AI query coverage. For searches that are less supported in AI Overviews—things like restaurants and financial services—the traffic change has been negligible. And there are always exceptions. Yu suggests that some large businesses with high AI Overview query coverage have seen much smaller drops in traffic because they rank extremely well as both AI citations and organic results.

Lower traffic isn’t the end of the world for some businesses. Last May, AI Overviews were largely absent from B2B queries, but that turned around in a big way in recent months. BrightEdge estimates that 70 percent of B2B searches now have AI answers, which has reduced traffic for many companies. Yu doesn’t think it’s all bad, though. “People don’t click through as much—they engage a lot more on the AI—but when they do click, the conversion rate for the business goes up,” Yu says. In theory, serious buyers click and window shoppers don’t.

But the Internet is not a giant mall that exists only for shoppers. It is, first and foremost, a place to share and find information, and AI Overviews have hit some purveyors of information quite hard. At launch, AI Overviews were heavily focused on “What is” and “How to” queries. Such “service content” is a staple of bloggers and big media alike, and these types of publishers aren’t looking for sales conversions—it’s traffic that matters. And they’re getting less of it because AI Overviews “helpfully” repackages and remixes their content, eliminating the need to click through to the site. Some publishers are righteously indignant, asking how it’s fair for Google to remix content it doesn’t own, and to do so without compensation.

But Google’s intentions don’t end with AI Overviews. Last week, the company started an expanded public test of so-called “AI Mode,” right from the front page. AI Mode doesn’t even bother with those blue links. It’s a chatbot experience that, at present, tries to answer your query without clearly citing sources inline. (On some occasions, it will mention Reddit or Wikipedia.) On the right side of the screen, Google provides a little box with three sites linked, which you can expand to see more options. To the end user, it’s utterly unclear if those are “sources,” “recommendations,” or “partner deals.”

Perhaps more surprisingly, in our testing, not a single AI Mode “sites box” listed a site that ranked on the first page for the same query on a regular search. That is, the links in AI Mode for “best foods to eat for a cold” don’t overlap at all with the SERP for the same query in Google Search. In fairness, AI Mode is very new, and its behavior will undoubtedly change. But the direction the company is headed seems clear.

Google’s real goal is to keep you on Google or other Alphabet properties. In 2019, Rand Fishkin noticed that Google’s evolution from search engine to walled garden was at a tipping point. At that time—and for the first time—more than half of Google searches resulted in zero click-throughs to other sites. But data did show large numbers of clicks to Google’s own properties, like YouTube and Maps. If Google doesn’t intend to deliver a “zero-click” search experience, you wouldn’t know it from historical performance data or the new features the company develops.

You also wouldn’t know it from the way AI Overviews work. They do cite some of the sources used in building each output, and data suggests people click on those links. But are the citations accurate? Is every source used for constructing an AI Overview cited? We don’t really know, as Google is famously opaque about how its search works. We do know that Google uses a customized version of Gemini to support AI Overviews and that Gemini has been trained on billions and billions of webpages.

When AI Overviews do cite a source, it’s not clear how those sources came to be the ones cited. There’s good reason to be suspicious here: AI Overview’s output is not great, as witnessed by the numerous hallucinations we all know and love (telling people to eat rocks, for instance). The only thing we know for sure is that Google isn’t transparent about any of this.

No signs of slowing

Despite all of that, Google is not slowing down on AI in search. More recent core updates have only solidified this new arrangement with an ever-increasing number of AI-answered queries. The company appears OK with its current accuracy problems, or at the very least, it’s comfortable enough to push out AI updates anyway. Google appears to have been caught entirely off guard by the public launch of ChatGPT, and it’s now utilizing its search dominance to play catch-up.

To make matters even more dicey, Google isn’t even trying to address the biggest issue in all this: The company’s quest for zero-click search harms the very content creators upon which the company has built its empire.

For its part, Google has been celebrating its AI developments, insisting that content producers don’t know what’s best for them, refuting any concerns with comments about search volume increases and ever-more-complex search query strings. The changes must be working!

Google has been building toward this moment for years. The company started with a list of 10 blue links and nothing else, but little by little, it pushed the links down the page and added more content that keeps people in the Google ecosystem. Way back in 2007, Google added Universal Search, which allowed it to insert content from Google Maps, YouTube, and other services. In 2009, Rich Snippets began displaying more data from search results on SERPs. In 2012, the Knowledge Graph began extracting data from search results to display answers in the search results. Each change kept people on Google longer and reduced click-throughs, all the while pushing the search results down the page.

AI Overviews, and especially AI Mode, are the logical outcome of Google’s yearslong transformation from an indexer of information to an insular web portal built on scraping content from around the web. Earlier in Google’s evolution, the implicit agreement was that websites would allow Google to crawl their pages in exchange for sending them traffic. That relationship has become strained as the company has kept more traffic for itself, reducing click-throughs to websites even as search volume continues to increase. And locking Google out isn’t a realistic option when the company controls almost the entire search market.

Even when Google has taken a friendlier approach, business concerns could get in the way. During the search antitrust trial, documents showed that Google initially intended to let sites opt out of being used for AI training for its search-based AI features—but these sites would still be included in search results. The company ultimately canned that idea, leaving site operators with the Pyrrhic choice of participating in the AI “revolution” or becoming invisible on the web. Google now competes with, rather than supports, the open web.

When many of us look at Google’s search results today, the vibe feels off. Maybe it’s the AI, maybe it’s Google’s algorithm, or maybe the Internet just isn’t what it once was. Whatever the cause, the shift toward zero-click search that began more than a decade ago was made clear by the March 2024 core update, and it has only accelerated with the launch of AI Mode. Even businesses that have escaped major traffic drops from AI Overviews could soon find that Google’s AI-only search can get much more overbearing.

The AI slop will continue until morale improves.

Ryan Whitwam is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering the ways Google, AI, and mobile technology continue to change the world. Over his 20-year career, he’s written for Android Police, ExtremeTech, Wirecutter, NY Times, and more. He has reviewed more phones than most people will ever own. You can follow him on Bluesky, where you will see photos of his dozens of mechanical keyboards.

Zero-click searches: Google’s AI tools are the culmination of its hubris Read More »

Google to give app devs access to Gemini Nano for on-device AI

AI, Google, Tech / Shannon Garcia / May 17, 2025

The rapid expansion of generative AI has changed the way Google and other tech giants design products, but most of the AI features you’ve used are running on remote servers with a ton of processing power. Your phone has a lot less power, but Google appears poised to give developers some important new mobile AI tools. At I/O next week, Google will likely announce a new set of APIs to let developers leverage the capabilities of Gemini Nano for on-device AI.

Google has quietly published documentation on big new AI features for developers. According to Android Authority, an update to the ML Kit SDK will add API support for on-device generative AI features via Gemini Nano. It’s built on AI Core, similar to the experimental Edge AI SDK, but it plugs into an existing model with a set of predefined features that should be easy for developers to implement.

Google says ML Kit’s GenAI APIs will enable apps to do summarization, proofreading, rewriting, and image description without sending data to the cloud. However, Gemini Nano doesn’t have as much power as the cloud-based version, so expect some limitations. For example, Google notes that summaries can only have a maximum of three bullet points, and image descriptions will only be available in English. The quality of outputs could also vary based on the version of Gemini Nano on a phone. The standard version (Gemini Nano XS) is about 100MB in size, but Gemini Nano XXS as seen on the Pixel 9a is a quarter of the size. It’s text-only and has a much smaller context window.

Not all versions of Gemini Nano are created equal. Credit: Ryan Whitwam

This move is good for Android in general because ML Kit works on devices outside Google’s Pixel line. While Pixel devices use Gemini Nano extensively, several other phones are already designed to run this model, including the OnePlus 13, Samsung Galaxy S25, and Xiaomi 15. As more phones add support for Google’s AI model, developers will be able to target those devices with generative AI features.

Google to give app devs access to Gemini Nano for on-device AI Read More »

“Google wanted that”: Nextcloud decries Android permissions as “gatekeeping”

android, app permissions, cloud platform, file syncing, Google, nextcloud, Tech / 9u50fv / May 14, 2025

Nextcloud is a host-your-own cloud platform that wants to help you “Regain control over your data.” It contains products that allow for video chat, file storage, collaborative editing, and other stuff that reads a lot like a DIY Google Workspace replacement.

It’s hard to offer that kind of full replacement, though, if your Android app can’t upload anything other than media files. Since mid-2024, Nextcloud claims, Google has refused to reinstate the access it needs for uploading and syncing other file types.

“To make it crystal clear: All of you as users have a worse Nextcloud Files client because Google wanted that,” reads a Nextcloud blog post from May 13, attributed to its team. “We understand and share your frustration, but there is nothing we can do.”

A notice in Nextcloud’s Android app regarding file uploads. Credit: Nextcloud

Ars has reached out to Google for comment and will update this post with any response. A representative for NextCloud told Ars late Tuesday that the company had no update on its Android app.

Nextcloud states that it has had read and write access to all file types since its first Android app. In September 2024, a Nextcloud Android update with “All files access” was “refused out of the blue,” with a request that the app use “a more privacy aware replacement,” Nextcloud claims. The firm states it has provided background and explanations but received “the same copy-and-paste answers or links to documentation” from Google.

“Google wanted that”: Nextcloud decries Android permissions as “gatekeeping” Read More »

Google introduces Advanced Protection mode for its most at-risk Android users

advanced protection mode, android, Biz & IT, Google, hacking, Security / Shannon Garcia / May 14, 2025

Google is adding a new security setting to Android to provide an extra layer of resistance against attacks that infect devices, tap calls traveling through insecure carrier networks, and deliver scams through messaging services.

On Tuesday, the company unveiled the Advanced Protection mode, most of which will be rolled out in the upcoming release of Android 16. The setting comes as mercenary malware sold by NSO Group and a cottage industry of other exploit sellers continues to thrive. These players provide attacks-as-a-service through end-to-end platforms that exploit zero-day vulnerabilities on targeted devices, infect them with advanced spyware, and then capture contacts, message histories, locations, and other sensitive information. Over the past decade, phones running fully updated versions of Android and iOS have routinely been hacked through these services.

A core suite of enhanced security features

Advanced Protection is Google’s latest answer to this type of attack. By flipping a single button in device settings, users can enable a host of protections that can thwart some of the most common techniques used in sophisticated hacks. In some cases, the protections hamper performance and capabilities of the device, so Google is recommending the new mode mainly for journalists, elected officials, and other groups who are most often targeted or have the most to lose when infected.

“With the release of Android 16, users who choose to activate Advanced Protection will gain immediate access to a core suite of enhanced security features,” Google’s product manager for Android Security, Il-Sung Lee, wrote. “Additional Advanced Protection features like Intrusion Logging, USB protection, the option to disable auto-reconnect to insecure networks, and integration with Scam Detection for Phone by Google will become available later this year.”

Google introduces Advanced Protection mode for its most at-risk Android users Read More »

Google’s search antitrust trial is wrapping up—here’s what we learned

AI, antitrust, DoJ, Google, search, Tech / Mike M. / May 10, 2025

Google and the DOJ have had their say; now it’s in the judge’s hands.

Last year, United States District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google violated antitrust law by illegally maintaining a monopoly in search. Now, Google and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have had their say in the remedy phase of the trial, which wraps up today. It will determine the consequences for Google’s actions, potentially changing the landscape for search as we rocket into the AI era, whether we like it or not.

The remedy trial featured over 20 witnesses, including representatives from some of the most important technology firms in the world. Their statements about the past, present, and future of search moved markets, but what does the testimony mean for Google?

Everybody wants Chrome

One of the DOJ’s proposed remedies is to force Google to divest Chrome and the open source Chromium project. Google has been adamant both in and out of the courtroom that it is the only company that can properly run Chrome. It says selling Chrome would negatively impact privacy and security because Google’s technology is deeply embedded in the browser. And regardless, Google Chrome would be too expensive for anyone to buy.

Unfortunately for Google, it may have underestimated the avarice of its rivals. The DOJ called witnesses from Perplexity, OpenAI, and Yahoo—all of them said their firms were interested in buying Chrome. Yahoo’s Brian Provost noted that the company is currently working on a browser that supports the company’s search efforts. Provost said that it would take 6–9 months just to get a working prototype, but buying Chrome would be much faster. He suggested Yahoo’s search share could rise from the low single digits to double digits almost immediately with Chrome.

Break up the company without touching the sides and getting shocked! — Credit: Aurich Lawson

Meanwhile, OpenAI is burning money on generative AI, but Nick Turley, product manager for ChatGPT, said the company was prepared to buy Chrome if the opportunity arises. Like Yahoo, OpenAI has explored designing its own browser, but acquiring Chrome would instantly give it 3.5 billion users. If OpenAI got its hands on Chrome, Turley predicted an “AI-first” experience.

On the surface, the DOJ’s proposal to force a Chrome sale seems like an odd remedy for a search monopoly. However, the testimony made the point rather well. Search and browsers are inextricably linked—putting a different search engine in the Chrome address bar could give the new owner a major boost.

Browser choice conundrum

Also at issue in the trial are the massive payments Google makes to companies like Apple and Mozilla for search placement, as well as restrictions on search and app pre-loads on Android phones. The government says these deals are anti-competitive because they lock rivals out of so many distribution mechanisms.

Google pays Apple and Mozilla billions of dollars per year to remain the default search engine in their browsers. Apple’s Eddie Cue admitted he’s been losing sleep worrying about the possibility of losing that revenue. Meanwhile, Mozilla CFO Eric Muhlheim explained that losing the Google deal could spell the end of Firefox. He testified that Mozilla would have to make deep cuts across the company, which could lead to a “downward spiral” that dooms the browser.

Google’s goal here is to show that forcing it to drop these deals could actually reduce consumer choice, which does nothing to level the playing field, as the DOJ hopes to do. Google’s preferred remedy is to simply have less exclusivity in its search deals across both browsers and phones.

The great Google spinoff

While Google certainly doesn’t want to lose Chrome, there may be a more fundamental threat to its business in the DOJ’s remedies. The DOJ argued that Google’s illegal monopoly has given it an insurmountable technology lead, but a collection of data remedies could address that. Under the DOJ proposal, Google would have to license some of its core search technology, including the search index and ranking algorithm.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai gave testimony at the trial and cited these data remedies as no better than a spinoff of Google search. Google’s previous statements have referred to this derisively as “white labeling” Google search. Pichai claimed these remedies could force Google to reevaluate the amount it spends on research going forward, slowing progress in search for it and all the theoretical licensees.

Currently, there is no official API for syndicating Google’s search results. There are scrapers that aim to offer that service, but that’s a gray area, to say the least. Google has even rejected lucrative deals to share its index. Turley noted in his testimony that OpenAI approached Google to license the index for ChatGPT, but Google decided the deal could harm its search dominance, which was more important than a short-term payday.

AI advances

Initially, the DOJ wanted to force Google to stop investing in AI firms, fearing its influence could reduce competition as it gained control or acquired these startups. The government has backed away from this remedy, but AI is still core to the search trial. That seemed to surprise Judge Mehta.

During Pichai’s testimony, Mehta remarked that the status of AI had shifted considerably since the liability phase of the trial in 2023. “The consistent testimony from the witnesses was that the integration of AI and search or the impact of AI on search was years away,” Mehta said. Things are very different now, Mehta noted, with multiple competitors to Google in AI search. This may actually help Google’s case.

AI search has exploded since the 2023 trial, with Google launching its AI-only search product in beta earlier this year.

Throughout the trial, Google has sought to paint search as a rapidly changing market where its lead is no longer guaranteed. Google’s legal team pointed to the meteoric rise of ChatGPT, which has become an alternative to traditional search for many people.

On the other hand, Google doesn’t want to look too meek and ineffectual in the age of AI. Apple’s Eddie Cue testified toward the end of the trial and claimed that rival traditional search providers like DuckDuckGo don’t pose a real threat to Google, but AI does. According to Cue, search volume in Safari was down for the first time in April, which he attributed to people using AI services instead. Google saw its stock price drop on the news, forcing it to issue a statement denying Cue’s assessment. It says searches in Safari and other products are still growing.

A waiting game

With the arguments made, Google’s team will have to sweat it out this summer while Mehta decides on remedies. A decision is expected in August of this year, but that won’t be the end of it. Google is still hoping to overturn the original verdict. After the remedies are decided, it’s going to appeal and ask for a pause on the implementation of remedies. So it could be a while before anything changes for Google.

In the midst of all that, Google is still pursuing an appeal of the Google Play case brought by Epic Games, as well as the ad tech case that it lost a few weeks ago. That remedy trial will begin in September.

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