GoKawiil
Tech News
Google has removed the Gemini Pro model from its $5-per-month AI Plus subscription, limiting those users to the Flash and Flash-Lite models instead. A longtime subscriber says Google notified them by email last week, offering a choice to keep AI Plus, upgrade to the pricier AI Pro tier to regain Pro access, or cancel outright. The subscriber opted to cancel AI Plus but continues using Gemini's free tier.
Google's 2024 rollout of AI Overviews, which places AI-generated summaries above traditional search links, has altered how readers interact with search results. Investigations by the Press Gazette found the feature appearing in roughly a quarter of news-related searches by May 2024, with effects on publisher traffic becoming evident by August. The News/Media Alliance had warned the change could severely hurt web traffic for news outlets.
Chatbot startup Character.AI has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, nearly two years after a Florida mother sued the company, its founders and Google, alleging its chatbots contributed to her 14-year-old son's suicide. The platform, once valued at over $1 billion with backing from investors including a16z, had drawn scrutiny for hosting chatbots centered on suicide themes and offering weak safeguards for young users.
A published guide explains a workaround that lets users turn off Google's AI Overviews feature, which automatically generates AI summaries atop search results. The method reportedly restores a more traditional search experience that prioritizes links to original web sources rather than AI-generated summaries.
Several Google employees have resigned in protest over the company's artificial intelligence contracts with military organizations, according to a BBC report. Google responded by saying it follows a consistent review process for such public sector contracts, including compliance checks against its acceptable use policies and AI principles, and maintains channels for employees to raise ethical concerns without fear of retaliation.
Google is rolling out its Personal Intelligence feature for Gemini to Android Auto starting today, with support for vehicles running Google Built-in software arriving in the coming months. The feature, which lets Gemini draw on personal data like Gmail, Calendar and Photos to answer queries, remains optional for users.
Google has begun bringing its Gemini Personal Intelligence feature, which lets the assistant draw on data from linked Google apps like Gmail, to Android Auto. The rollout starts globally today, excluding Switzerland, the EEA, UK and Nigeria, and the company plans to extend it to cars with Google built-in in coming months.
Google One's paid plans extend well beyond cloud storage, with higher tiers unlocking tiered access to Gemini AI features across Gmail, Docs, Slides and other Google apps. The AI Plus tier doubles Gemini usage and adds Flash model access, while AI Pro offers four times the free usage limit, the Gemini 4 Argon model, a larger context window, and Deep Research capabilities. The top-tier 30TB AI Ultra plan provides 20 times the Gemini usage of the Pro tier along with the most capable models in Google Flow and Gemini Notebook.
Google has launched Gmail Live, a conversational voice search feature for Gmail that lets AI plan subscribers ask natural-language questions to find information buried in emails, such as flight gate numbers or school updates. The company is also rolling out related tools, Docs Live and Keep Live, which use voice input to draft documents and organize notes respectively. All three features exit beta this week, having first been shown at Google I/O last month.
White Circle, an AI safety testing firm backed by researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind, published a preprint showing that image generators including DALL·E 3, Google's Nano Banana 2, and GPT-Image-2 can be tricked into producing explicit content using publicly available tools and API calls. The researchers say they bypassed safety filters roughly 13 percent of the time using a novel attack method.
Google has outlined how Gemini Spark, an always-on AI agent available to Gemini Pro and Ultra subscribers, can run tasks in the background even when a user's devices are off. Capabilities include summarizing a week's worth of emails, building to-do lists, and automatically adding appointments to a calendar, provided users enable connections to Gmail, Calendar and Drive, which are off by default. Google states Spark checks with users before taking major actions, and notes some features may not be available in all regions.
Google announced that users who build apps via prompts in AI Studio can now publish them for use on their own devices through a new 'personal library' in the Play Store, without needing a paid developer account. The feature targets users 18 and older in the US and select markets, and Google says it plans to add secure sharing with friends and family later. To reach a global audience, creators would need to upgrade to a professional developer account and pass standard Play Store safety reviews.