Michele Spagnuolo, the Google engineer charged with commodities fraud, wire fraud and money laundering over Polymarket bets made using the alias 'AlphaRaccoon,' has filed a motion to dismiss. His lawyers argue the wagers, which reportedly netted him over $1.2 million including a correct bet on singer D4vd, are informal gambling rather than regulated financial swaps, and that U.S. authorities lack jurisdiction since he is a non-U.S. citizen.
Google DeepMind and Google Research launched WeatherNext 3, a deep-learning forecasting model that outperformed rival AI systems from Microsoft, Nvidia and ECMWF, as well as traditional forecasts from the US National Weather Service and ECMWF, on the Operational WeatherBench benchmark. Google says the model will soon power weather data shown in Search, Maps and Gemini, and will also be offered to researchers and developers through its cloud platform.
Thousands of X (formerly Twitter) users reported that Grok, the platform's AI chatbot, stopped working starting around 9:00 AM ET, according to Downdetector data. Affected users received an error message stating the model was unavailable and prompting them to try a different one. X has not issued any official statement addressing the outage.
Microsoft AI launched MAI-Transcribe-2, a speech-to-text model it says beats OpenAI, Google and ElevenLabs on speed, accuracy and cost, pricing it at 10 cents per audio hour—a 72% cut from the $0.36 rate it charged for its first model just five months ago. The new version supports 60 languages, up from 43, and adds built-in speaker diarization and word-level timestamps, targeting noisy real-world business audio rather than clean recordings.
Google is rolling out version 1.0.0.94 of its Pixel Weather app for Wear OS, adding three new watch face complications: Air quality index, Pollen, and Precipitation. These join the existing Sunrise/sunset, UV Index, and Weather complications available to Pixel Watch owners. Users can add them through the Pixel Watch companion app or by long-pressing the watch face directly.
OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini and X's Grok all experienced service disruptions at the same time on Thursday morning. OpenAI said it applied a mitigation and was monitoring recovery, while Anthropic reported issues limited to its Opus 4.8 and Opus 5 models. Downdetector data suggested OpenAI's problems were largely resolved as other services, including Google and Fortnite, continued to face issues.
Google has begun rolling out Gmail Live, Docs Live, and Keep Live, conversational AI tools that let users speak to these apps to find information, draft documents, or take notes. Users can ask Gmail Live to surface details buried in email threads, have Docs Live turn spoken descriptions into structured documents, and dictate notes naturally to Keep Live. The features, first shown at Google I/O in May, are now live globally in English on mobile, with availability varying by subscription tier and platform.
Motorola has released the Moto Watch Ultra, its first premium smartwatch to run Google's Wear OS instead of the custom software used on its earlier Moto Watch. The 46mm stainless steel device uses a Snapdragon W5 Plus Gen 1 chip, features a 1.5-inch OLED display, and comes in black or silver with interchangeable leather and silicone straps, an IP68 rating, and 5ATM water resistance.
Three climbers used Google Gemini alongside YouTube and AllTrails to plan a Mount Shasta ascent, and the chatbot told them the trip would take about eight hours. The climb actually took 16 hours, well past the noon turnaround time rangers recommend, leaving them short on water, food and battery power. A phone died mid-descent, one climber fell and injured a knee in the dark, and the group had to call 911 before rangers reached them roughly 30 hours after they set out.
Google's new Antigravity coding assistant carries terms of service stating that using it through unauthorized third-party integrations may lead to suspension of a user's Google account. A Google representative pushed back publicly on claims mischaracterizing the policy, saying critics were misrepresenting how it actually works and noting internal discussions about eventually allowing the harness and subscription to work with other surfaces.
Google has released WeatherNext 3, an updated AI weather forecasting model that generates hourly predictions using live satellite observations rather than relying solely on historical data. The model can resolve certain variables like temperature and moisture at up to 5-kilometer resolution, a sharp improvement over its predecessor's 25-kilometer, 6-hourly forecasts.
A new analysis argues that Google's Pixel phones have plateaued, with yearly hardware and software updates offering little meaningful improvement over previous generations. The piece contends that fragmented AI features, scattered branding, and incremental design changes are making Pixels feel unexciting compared to rivals.
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