Articles tagged Google
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Google’s CC Is a Family AI With Its Own Google Account. Six People Choose What It Sees.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Software, Artificial Intelligence,
There is a new Google account in some households this week, and it does not belong to anyone who lives there. Google Labs has relaunched CC as an AI agent for families and groups, and it runs on its own Google account. Up to six people connect to that account and decide, one at a time, what it gets to see.
Google says the separate account gives CC "a distinct identity and clear permissions model," which is a polite way of saying the company knows a shared agent with a line into six inboxes is a harder sell than a personal one. What you get in return is one place where the household calendar, the task list and the school emails all land. Each morning CC sends a brief it calls "Your Day Ahead": who needs to be where, what needs to be done.
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He Worked on AGI Safety at Google DeepMind. Now He Says AI Might Kill Us All.
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Corporate News, Google, Artificial Intelligence,
Bilal Chughtai spent about a year and a half at Google DeepMind working on AGI safety and alignment. He resigned in July. On Monday he said why, publicly, under his own name: "I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome."
Researchers leaving AI labs with a warning attached is not new this year. Doing it from inside Google's lab is. Chughtai appears to be the first DeepMind employee to quit and say this on the record, which is how a post from a research engineer most people had never heard of ended up in Bloomberg within a day.
GM Brings CarPlay Back to Its Trucks, and This Time It Shares the Screen
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Google, Transportation,
Three years ago GM decided it was done with phone projection. Today it announced the opposite. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are coming back to its cars, though they no longer get the whole screen.
The new interface debuts on the 2027 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 and GMC Sierra 1500, with other GM models to follow. CarPlay and Android Auto now run in a window alongside GM's own software, so the map, the trailering readouts and the truck's settings stay visible while your phone's apps do their thing next to them.
Click to continue reading GM Brings CarPlay Back to Its Trucks, and This Time It Shares the Screen
Google’s WeatherNext 3 Redraws the Forecast Every Hour
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Science, Artificial Intelligence,
The forecast you checked at breakfast was probably built from a picture of the atmosphere taken several hours before you looked at it. That lag is baked into how traditional forecasting works, and it is the thing Google DeepMind went after with WeatherNext 3, announced Thursday and already wired into Search, the Gemini app and Google Maps.
The big change is cadence. The previous version put out a new forecast every six hours. This one does it every hour, pulling in live geostationary satellite imagery as it arrives instead of waiting on the usual analysis cycle. Google calls the result "roughly five times sharper than our previous model."
Click to continue reading Google’s WeatherNext 3 Redraws the Forecast Every Hour
The Google TV Streamer Costs $150 Now, and Google Isn’t Saying Why
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Home Entertainment,
The Google TV Streamer launched in 2024 at $100. It costs $150 on the Google Store today. Same box, same 4GB of RAM, same 32GB of storage, same remote, 50 percent more money.
Google did not announce this. No blog post, no new product page explaining a new value proposition, no statement. The number on the store listing changed, Best Buy's listing changed with it, and if you had one sitting in a cart you found out by looking.
Click to continue reading The Google TV Streamer Costs $150 Now, and Google Isn’t Saying Why
You Don’t Own What You Bought. Here’s the Proof. (Video)
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Editorial, Home Entertainment, Smart Home, Misc. Tech, Videos,
You bought the thing. It's sitting in your house. The box listed the features, you paid the money, the return window closed. So you own it, right? Here's the uncomfortable answer I landed on after digging through more than a decade of firmware updates, lawsuits, and shutdown notices: a company can sell you a product, wait out your return window, and then reach back into it to slow it down, strip its features, or kill it entirely, without anyone ever touching the hardware sitting in your living room.
Click to continue reading You Don’t Own What You Bought. Here’s the Proof. (Video)
Fitbit Data Can Finally Write to Apple Health, Twelve Years Late
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Wearables, Google,
If you wear a Fitbit and carry an iPhone, you've spent the last twelve years running a small, annoying errand. Your steps and sleep lived in one app. Everything else your phone tracked lived in Apple Health. Getting them into the same place meant paying for a third-party bridge and hoping it didn't break. That errand is finally over.
Google Health version 5.05 landed on iOS this week, and buried in the release notes is the thing people have been asking for since 2014: you can now share your exercise records, sleep, vitals, steps, and more from Google Health into Apple Health. It works for Fitbit trackers and the Pixel Watch, since Google Health replaced the old Fitbit app back in May.
Click to continue reading Fitbit Data Can Finally Write to Apple Health, Twelve Years Late
Gemini 3.6 Is Google Buying Time in the AI Race
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Editorial, Google, Artificial Intelligence,
Every few weeks, one of the big AI labs drops a new model and asks you to care. Google's latest ask is Gemini 3.6, and the honest pitch is sitting right there in the release: it is cheaper to run than the last one. That is it. That is the headline feature.
Which is not nothing, if you are the person paying the bill. Google calls 3.6 its workhorse model, the one meant to balance quality against cost, and it does deliver real savings there: up to 65% fewer output tokens than 3.5 Flash in some cases, and about 17% fewer overall. Tokens are how these models get billed, so fewer tokens means a smaller invoice for the companies wiring Gemini into their apps. For everyone else, it is the kind of improvement you feel in a spreadsheet, not in a conversation.
Click to continue reading Gemini 3.6 Is Google Buying Time in the AI Race
Samsung Put Google’s Research Brain on Your New Foldable. Does It Belong There?
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Smartphones, Google, Artificial Intelligence,
NotebookLM has quietly become the app that power users swear by, the thing you open on a laptop that already has thirty tabs fighting for space. It reads your sources, connects the dots, and answers questions about them. So here is the odd part of Samsung's latest Galaxy Unpacked pitch: that tool, now rebranded Gemini Notebook, comes preloaded on phones you fold in half.
The Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra, Z Fold 8, and Z Flip 8 all ship with it built in. On paper that sounds like a real upgrade over yet another chatbot shortcut. In practice, it raises a simple question worth asking before you get excited: is a deep-research desk tool something you actually want to reach for on a phone?
Google Search Wants to Finish the Job: AI Mode Now Talks to Instacart, Canva, and YouTube Music
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Google, Internet, Artificial Intelligence,
For as long as any of us have used it, Google Search has been the place you go to figure out what to do next. Where to eat, what to buy, how to fix the thing under the sink. Google now wants it to be the place you actually do those things. This week it started rolling out new connections in AI Mode that wire Search directly into Instacart, Canva, and YouTube Music, so the answer and the action finally live in the same window.
The pitch, in Google's own words, is to "reduce the steps between planning a task in Search and completing it in another app." In practice that means you can plan a backyard barbecue in AI Mode, watch it turn the menu into a grocery list, and push those ingredients straight into an Instacart cart without opening a single new tab. It is a small convenience with a big ambition behind it, and it tells you a lot about where Google thinks Search is headed.