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Google — AI news & analysis
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Google retired two Gemini Flash models by rerouting them, not by failing them
Google's Gemini API changelog for 8 October 2026 deprecated gemini-3.5-flash and gemini-3.7-flash, and said every request to both is automatically routed to a different model. Both IDs are gone from the models page and the pricing page, and the deprecations page rows that cover them carry no date for when any of it happened. The bill does not change; what changes is that pinning a Gemini model ID no longer pins a model.
Read story →Google is paywalling a Gemini model its own Flash overtook in May — and charging $4.99 subscribers nothing for the privilege of losing it
From 9 October 2026 the free Gemini app drops to Flash-Lite only, and Google AI Plus subscribers lose the Pro model on a date Google will email them individually rather than publish. The Pro model in question is Gemini 3.1 Pro, which Google's own Gemini 3.5 Flash passed on benchmarks at I/O in May. The headline downgrade costs paying subscribers almost nothing. The free-tier cut is the one that matters, because it removes the only way to evaluate Gemini without a card.
Read story →OpenAI's oldest API surface runs out of models on Monday — and its own docs disagree about when your legacy fine-tunes die
On 28 September 2026 OpenAI shuts down gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct, davinci-002, babbage-002 and gpt-3.5-turbo-1106. The first three are the only models the legacy /v1/completions endpoint serves, so the endpoint does not get a replacement — it gets zero inhabitants. The deprecation table maps all four onto gpt-5.6-terra, a reasoning model on a different API surface at six times the output price, with no echo, no suffix, no best_of and no raw log-probabilities. And OpenAI's stated rule for fine-tunes contradicts its own shutdown date by 25 days.
Read story →Google's agent SDK will now run on your own GPU for nothing — the bill just moved from the meter to the VRAM
On 23 September 2026 Google added local model execution to the Antigravity SDK: agent loops running fully offline on LiteRT with Gemma 4 26B A4B, plus plug-and-play support for any OpenAI-compatible server including Ollama, LM Studio and vLLM. Zero token cost, no network. The entry fee is more than 24GB of VRAM or unified memory, and Google's own hybrid demo still sent 2.8% of tokens to the cloud — the 2.8% that does the planning.
Read story →The labs' private regulator has a name now — and the job it wants is deciding who counts as an independent auditor
The Information reported on 24 September 2026 that Google, OpenAI and Anthropic have agreed to stand up the Standards Authority for Frontier AI (SAFA), a FINRA-style self-regulator targeting a launch between the end of 2026 and early 2027. Its remit reportedly includes setting qualification requirements for third-party auditors. The CEO shortlist includes the former White House adviser who ruled out an FDA for AI; the science panel reportedly includes an OpenAI Foundation board member appointed two weeks ago. For buyers, the phrase 'independently evaluated' is losing its referent.
Read story →Google gave the AI avatar a face and didn't give it a price — that's the part to plan for
Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar went generally available in Gemini Enterprise on 24 September 2026, adding real-time lip-synced video to Google's speech-to-speech stack across 97 languages with US and EU endpoints. The audio still bills at $3/$12 per million tokens — about $0.011 a conversational minute. The video bills at nothing, because Google has not published a rate for it. HeyGen charges $0.10–$0.20 a minute for the same pixels. An unpriced line item on a GA enterprise product is a forward liability, not a discount.
Read story →Google's new voice models undercut everyone — but the headline feature is unavailable in the EU, and the price doubles on 1 January
Google shipped Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Flash-Lite TTS on 23 September 2026 at $9 and $6 per million audio tokens, roughly a third of ElevenLabs. Both rates double on 1 January 2027, the same date the rest of the Flash line resets. Voice replication, the feature the launch leads with, is blocked in the EEA, the UK, Switzerland, Illinois, Texas and India. And Google's #1 claim is measured on a benchmark built by a company whose founder now works at Google DeepMind.
Read story →Google shipped MCP's first consumer surface — and the news is the two things it refuses to do
On 16 September 2026 Google opened early access to Home MCP, a Model Context Protocol server that lets Claude, Antigravity, OpenClaw and other MCP clients read and control a Google Home. Five tools, US-only, English-only, gated behind the $20-a-month Home Premium Advanced tier and a Google Cloud project you publish yourself. Agents cannot unlock doors and cannot create automations. Those two exclusions are the first mainstream consumer answer to what an agent should never be allowed to do — and they are enforced server-side, where a user cannot override them.
Read story →Google gave every engineer a rival's model and kept its own harness. The config it gave them is not the one you can buy.
On 15 September 2026 Business Insider reported that Google opened Claude Opus 5 to all of its engineers through Antigravity, while barring Claude Code itself and keeping Gemini as the internal default. Google says this is 'consistent with our external Antigravity enterprise offering' — but Antigravity's own published model table marks every third-party model closed on the Enterprise tier. The buying lesson is that model choice and harness choice are separate purchases, and only one of them is listed on the page you are reading.
Read story →Three labs have been building a private AI standards body since July — without the antitrust waiver their own proposal says it needs
On 13 September 2026 The Information reported that Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind have held working-group meetings since July on an industry-run body to set AI safety benchmarks and auditing rules. Amodei's essay the day before said such coordination requires a narrow US antitrust waiver first. No waiver exists; the government-led route stalled in May. Cohere's CEO called the group 'the cartel'. Microsoft went the other way and published a document. For buyers, the difference between a membership and a document is the whole story.
Read story →GPT-6 Astra gained four points without OpenAI shipping anything. Artificial Analysis rewrote the benchmark instead.
Artificial Analysis published Intelligence Index v4.2 on 4 September, days after its scoring of GPT-6 Astra drew public skepticism. It added two benchmarks, dropped a saturated one, fixed scoring errors, and doubled private held-out test data to 40% of the index. Astra moved from roughly level with GPT-5.6 Sol to four points ahead. Claude Fable 5.1 still leads. If your procurement doc names a leaderboard score, it names a moving target.
Read story →Google's Lyria 3.5 costs four times what a Suno song costs — and it is still the only frontier music model a developer can actually buy
Google shipped Lyria 3.5 to the Gemini app and opened the Gemini API at $0.08 per song. That is 4x Suno Pro's effective per-song rate. It reads like a losing price until you notice Suno has never sold a public API, and that every Lyria output carries a SynthID mark while Suno's watermarking is still rolling out.
Read story →Four AI providers wobbled in the same three hours — and for thirty minutes there was nowhere to fail over to
On 3 September 2026 Anthropic, xAI and OpenAI all confirmed incidents inside the same morning, and Gemini showed elevated failures nobody at Google logged. No shared cloud, CDN or routing failure has been identified. Line up the four timelines and there is a roughly thirty-minute window when every major frontier endpoint was degraded at once. That is the number that should worry anyone who bought a second model as an insurance policy — because a multi-model strategy is only resilient if its alternatives fail independently, and nobody measures whether they do.
Read story →Google's new transcription model didn't reset the speech-to-text price floor — it finally brought Google down to it
Gemini 3.5 Transcribe entered public preview on 26 August 2026 at roughly $0.30 per audio-hour with diarization included, claiming 2.6% WER. The headline reads like a price war. The rate card says otherwise: Deepgram and AssemblyAI have been at or below that number for years. What actually got repriced by ~64% is Google's own Cloud Speech-to-Text. Here is the real comparison, the billing-model catch nobody is mentioning, and the session limits that decide whether you can use it at all.
Read story →Google shipped Gemini 3.7 Flash — a cheaper, faster coding workhorse — while the flagship it actually promised is still missing
On 13 August 2026 Google launched Gemini 3.7 Flash, its third Flash model in seven weeks, with big coding gains (DeepSWE 49%→65.3%) and an introductory price of $0.75/$3.75 per million tokens — half of 3.6 Flash. It is a genuinely strong mid-tier coding-agent model and a clear price-war move. It is also, conspicuously, not the Gemini 3.5 Pro flagship Google promised in May and has now failed to ship for three months, in the middle of a leadership reshuffle. Here is what 3.7 Flash actually delivers, what it costs after the intro window, and why the model Google keeps shipping is not the one that matters most.
Read story →Anthropic's compute is being bought with somebody else's money — and kept off its balance sheet before an IPO
Google has assembled a chip-financing programme worth more than $150bn to supply Anthropic with TPUs. The hardware sits in a special-purpose vehicle, Broadcom guarantees roughly $31bn of the senior debt, Morgan Stanley occupies three roles at once, and bitcoin miners provide the buildings. S&P has already downgraded Broadcom over it.
Read story →Google's ATLAS report: AI reaches 68% of jobs but fully automates under 10% of tasks — the data says collaborator, not replacer
Google published its first AI & Economy ATLAS report on July 23 — an analysis of 15 million de-identified Gemini interactions across 150 countries, 800 occupations, and 4,000 tasks. The headline: AI now touches 68% of occupations (about 90% of US employment), but fully automates under 10% of tasks. People use it mostly to collaborate — research, draft, iterate, troubleshoot, learn — not to hand off whole jobs. And higher earners use it more. Here's what the data actually shows, what it doesn't, and what it means for your work.
Read story →Google ships Gemini 3.6 Flash (plus a cyber variant) while its flagship stays MIA — and the stopgap is genuinely good
With Gemini 3.5 Pro still stuck after three missed deadlines, Google shipped three Flash-tier models on July 21: Gemini 3.6 Flash ($1.50/$7.50, ~17% fewer output tokens and a March 2026 knowledge cutoff), the cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite ($0.30/$2.50), and a government-gated Gemini 3.5 Flash Cyber. It also teased Gemini 4. This is the stopgap the delay reporting predicted — and it's competitive. Here's what actually shipped, how it prices against rivals, and why the cyber variant matters.
Read story →Google's 'Frozen v2' would etch Gemini's architecture into silicon — a 6–10× efficiency bet that model design has stopped moving
Google is reportedly developing an AI inference chip codenamed Frozen v2 that hardwires Gemini's architecture — the blueprint, not the weights — directly into silicon. Engineers project 6 to 10 times more tokens per watt than Google's latest TPUs, with deployment targeted for 2028. Alphabet stock moved on the report. Here's what's reported versus confirmed, why the design is a bet that model architecture has stopped changing, and what it actually means for what you'll pay for inference.
Read story →Gemini 3.5 Pro misses a third deadline: Google scrapped the base model, and a stopgap Flash may ship first
Gemini 3.5 Pro has now missed three launch targets — June, early July, and July 17. Per reporting, Google DeepMind scrapped a nearly-finished base model and restarted pretraining after the rebuild fell short on coding, hallucinated too often, and broke down on recursive tool-calling and complex SVG generation. Registrations for a stopgap Flash model suggest Google needs something to ship. Google still hasn't confirmed a date, price, or spec. Here's what's confirmed versus reported, and what to do if you were waiting.
Read story →Google DeepMind's rough stretch: four senior researchers gone in a week — three to Anthropic — as Gemini 3.5 Pro slips to July
In roughly six days, Google DeepMind lost four senior AI researchers — Nobel laureate John Jumper, Jonas Adler, Alexander Pritzel, and Arthur Conmy — three of them to Anthropic, plus Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI a week earlier. At the same time, Gemini 3.5 Pro's long-promised June launch has reportedly slipped to July (per Business Insider and Reuters; Google hasn't officially confirmed). Together they raise real questions about Google's frontier-AI execution — but DeepMind is vast and Gemini is still the clear #2. Here's the honest read for anyone deciding whether to bet on Gemini.
Read story →Nobel laureate John Jumper leaves Google DeepMind for Anthropic — a signal Anthropic is going after AI for science
John Jumper — AlphaFold lead and 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry — announced he's leaving Google DeepMind for Anthropic after nearly nine years. It's the second marquee DeepMind departure to a rival in a single week, after Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer left for OpenAI. Jumper's specialty is AI for biology and protein science, so the move reads as Anthropic staking a claim on AI-for-science — connecting to its Mythos biomedical ambitions. Here's what's confirmed, what isn't, and what it means for where Claude goes next.
Read story →Noam Shazeer — Transformer co-inventor and Gemini co-lead — leaves Google for OpenAI
Noam Shazeer, Google VP of Engineering and co-lead of the Gemini model family, announced June 18, 2026 that he is leaving Google to join OpenAI. Shazeer co-authored the 2017 'Attention Is All You Need' paper that introduced the Transformer — the architecture under GPT, Gemini, and Claude. Google had brought him back from Character.AI in August 2024 in a deal reportedly worth ~$2.7 billion. His exact OpenAI title was not officially disclosed. The departure lands as Gemini 3.5 Pro remains unshipped and reshapes the OpenAI–Google talent rivalry.
Read story →Google shuts down Gemini CLI today for consumer tiers — forced migration to Antigravity CLI, no feature parity at launch
As of June 18, 2026, Gemini CLI and Gemini Code Assist IDE extensions stop serving free, Pro, and Ultra individual users — a hard deadline with no grace period, announced May 19. The replacement is the closed-source, Go-based Antigravity CLI (binary 'agy'), which Google says launches without 1:1 feature parity. The free tier's 1,000 requests/day becomes a weekly compute-based cap. Standard/Enterprise license holders keep Gemini CLI access. The best free terminal coding agent of 2026 effectively ends for individuals.
Read story →Apple picks Gemini over OpenAI — Siri AI runs on a custom 1.2T-parameter Google model at ~$1B/year, in Tim Cook's final WWDC keynote
At WWDC 2026 on June 8 — Tim Cook's final keynote as CEO before John Ternus takes over September 1 — Apple officially confirmed that Siri AI runs on a custom Google Gemini model (~1.2T parameters per Bloomberg + MacRumors reporting, ~$1B/year). Apple Intelligence combines on-device processing with Private Cloud Compute server-side execution. Standalone Siri app, 'Search or Ask' gesture, Dynamic Island integration on iPhone 16+, and 'Extensions' that let users pick Claude, Gemini, or other chatbots for Siri queries in iOS 27 / iPadOS 27 / macOS 27 'Golden Gate'.
Read story →Google I/O 2026 recap — Gemini 3.5 Flash ships; Omni, Spark, and a $100 AI Ultra tier
Google I/O 2026 keynote (May 19) shipped Gemini 3.5 Flash to production, previewed Gemini 3.5 Pro for next month, launched the Gemini Omni video model (image + audio + video + text input → editable video output), introduced the Gemini Spark personal agent, restructured Google AI Ultra to $100/month (with the old $250 tier dropping to $200), and confirmed Android XR audio glasses for fall 2026. Here's the verified recap for Pick Right readers.
Read story →The Android Show before I/O — Googlebooks, Aluminium OS, Gemini Intelligence across every form factor
The Android Show I/O 2026 edition (May 18, 2026, the day before the main keynote) confirmed Googlebooks (Android-based laptops from Acer/Asus/Dell/HP/Lenovo launching fall 2026), Aluminium OS as the unified ChromeOS+Android platform, Gemini Intelligence rolling out across Android/Wear/Auto/XR starting summer 2026, Android 17 features (Rambler speech-to-text, 3D Emoji, Pause Point, iOS-to-Android transfer), and Gemini for Chrome on Android via Gemini 3.1. Here's the substantive read for Pick Right readers tracking AI tool ecosystems.
Read story →Google I/O 2026 preview — Gemini Omni video model surfaces in a UI leak; what to actually watch tomorrow
Google I/O 2026 keynote lands May 19 at 10am PT. A model-card UI string for 'Gemini Omni' surfaced via Reddit on May 11, confirming a new video-generation model is in late-stage staging — strong on remixing, in-chat editing, and template-based creation, behind ByteDance's Seedance 2 on raw generation fidelity. Here's what to watch beyond the headline: Gemini integration depth across Android, Workspace, and the agent layer, plus the strategic context for Veo, Runway, and Kling.
Read story →Google to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic — the biggest cheque in its history
Google announced on April 24, 2026 it will invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic — $10B initial cash at a $350B valuation, $30B more contingent on milestones, plus 5 gigawatts of compute over five years. The largest single investment in Google's corporate history. What it means for Claude users and the AI infrastructure race.
Read story →Nano Banana now makes images from your Google Photos
Google rolled out personalized image generation in Gemini this week — Nano Banana can now create images using your private Google Photos as reference material. 'A claymation of me and my family on our favorite hike' works out of the box. Paid subscribers only, US first, opt-in required.
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