How to Turn Off AI in Your Google Docs
TechCrunch AI40 days agoTutorialGoogle has been aggressively surfacing Gemini AI features — including recurring "Write with Gemini" pop-ups — inside Google Docs, frustrating users who prefer a distraction-free writing environment. This TechCrunch tutorial walks readers through the steps required to suppress or disable these AI-driven prompts. It is aimed at anyone who wants more control over their Google Docs experience without losing access to the rest of the suite.
Google Bets on Gemini to Reinvent the Smart Home Speaker
TechCrunch AI40 days agoHardwareGoogle has unveiled a new $99.99 Google Home Speaker that swaps out the rule-based Google Assistant for Gemini-powered conversational interactions. The product represents a direct bet that generative AI can revive consumer interest in the smart speaker category. Rather than requiring precise voice commands, users can now speak more naturally with the device.
Gemini-Powered Google Home Speaker Arrives June 25 for $100
Ars Technica AI40 days agoHardwareGoogle has opened preorders for its new $100 Google Home Speaker, set to ship June 25, 2026 — roughly ten months after it was first announced. The device's primary selling point is deep Gemini AI integration rather than premium audio performance. The launch positions Google's smart speaker lineup squarely as an AI assistant platform rather than a high-fidelity audio product.
Google's First Smart Speaker in Six Years Ships June 29
The Verge AI40 days agoHardwareGoogle's Home Speaker, priced at $99 and announced nine months ago, ships June 29 with preorders opening June 17. The device ends a six-year gap in Google's smart speaker lineup and integrates Gemini AI. Its hardware — a slightly squished round form with touch-capacitive buttons — is unchanged from its original announcement, and the product narrowly missed a promised spring launch window.
Android 17 Launches with New Multitasking Tools as Google Expands Gemini Features
TechCrunch AI41 days agoReleaseGoogle has officially launched Android 17 alongside Wear OS 7, bringing new multitasking capabilities, enhanced parental controls, and security improvements to Android devices. The release is paired with a Pixel Drop update that deploys Google's latest AI models directly to Pixel hardware. Gemini features are notably expanded as part of this platform update.
Securing the Future of AI Agents
Google DeepMind Blog41 days agoCommentaryGoogle DeepMind has published a framework called the AI Control Roadmap aimed at securing internal systems that run AI agents. The approach pairs conventional security safeguards — such as access controls and least-privilege principles — with real-time behavioral monitoring designed for the speed and autonomy of AI agents. The roadmap signals DeepMind's view that neither purely traditional nor purely AI-specific security measures are sufficient on their own.
ChatGPT's Market Share Slips Below 50% for the First Time★ 72
TechCrunch AI42 days agoBusinessFor the first time since its launch, ChatGPT's share of the global AI assistant market has fallen below 50%, marking a notable competitive shift. The platform remains the clear market leader with over 1.1 billion monthly users, but rivals have grown substantially. Google's Gemini now claims 662 million monthly users and Anthropic's Claude reaches 245 million, together eroding ChatGPT's once near-total dominance.
Vibe-Coding a Gardening App With Gemini
The Verge AI44 days agoCommentaryThe author used Google's Gemini in AI Studio to generate an Android gardening app for organizing yard chores, weather-aware care, and plant diagnosis. Gemini quickly produced a working prototype, but the app needed repeated fixes for readability, scheduling, editing, live weather, and task logic. The experience showed that AI can be genuinely useful for narrow tasks, while still lacking real-world judgment and requiring clear human direction.
The Verge: Hollywood’s AI Future Is Bespoke Workflows, Not Vanilla Prompts
The Verge AI45 days agoCommentaryThe article reviews AI-assisted films shown at the 2026 Tribeca Film Festival and finds a clear divide between rough prompt-driven work and more carefully directed workflows. Google DeepMind’s Dear Upstairs Neighbors is presented as the strongest case, using custom Veo and Imagen models trained on human-made concept art. The Verge concludes that Hollywood’s likely AI future is bespoke studio tooling guided by artists, not commercially viable films generated from generic prompts.
AINews: Fable and Mythos Access Suspended Over Cybersecurity Risk★ 76
Latent Space45 days agoIncidentAnthropic’s Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 were abruptly suspended after a US export-control directive tied to a possible jailbreak and national cybersecurity risk. The roundup frames the event as a new “model sovereignty” warning for teams relying on closed frontier APIs. It also covers Kimi-K2.7-Code, MiniMax M3, DeepSWE replacing SWE-Bench Pro, agent-inference benchmarks, sandboxing, and Gemini-SQL2.
Google Sues Chinese Cybercrime Network Over Gemini-Aided Scam Sites
Ars Technica AI45 days agoIncidentGoogle filed a lawsuit against an alleged Chinese cybercrime network called Outsider Enterprise, claiming it used Gemini to help build scam websites at scale. The operation reportedly sent millions of messages and targeted hundreds of thousands of smartphone users with phishing pages impersonating mobile carriers and other services. The case highlights how generative AI can lower the cost of cybercrime while raising pressure on AI providers to police misuse.
Google I/O's Most Viral Moment Happened on Douyin?
量子位 QbitAI47 days agoCommentaryA standout moment from Google I/O 2026 found an unlikely second life on Douyin, China's dominant short-video platform. The article, published by QbitAI, highlights the irony of a Western developer conference generating its biggest buzz not on YouTube or X, but on a Chinese social app. The observation points to Douyin's growing role as a real-time barometer of how Chinese audiences—including developers and tech enthusiasts—absorb and react to global AI news.
2026 FusionNext: How Enterprises Turn Cloud Data Foundations into AI ROI
INSIDE 硬塞 AI47 days agoBusinessINSIDE’s sponsored recap of 2026 FusionNext, hosted by CloudMile, frames generative AI as a business execution challenge rather than a model-shopping exercise. Speakers from CloudMile, Google Cloud, Taiwan AI Academy, and enterprise customers emphasized data silos, governance, security, and cloud modernization as prerequisites for scalable AI agents. Case studies across healthcare, manufacturing, retail, media, gaming, and infrastructure positioned AI monetization as a long-term systems project built on reliable data and cross-functional sponsorship.
[AINews] Open Models, Model Labs vs Agent Labs, and the Untrainable★ 72
Latent Space47 days agoCommentaryThis AINews issue uses Sarah Guo’s essay as a lens for current AI industry debates: where open models matter, how agent labs differ from model labs, and what cannot be trained away. It also recaps discourse around Anthropic Fable/Mythos, Fable 5’s capabilities, Google’s DiffusionGemma, and maturing agent infrastructure. The central takeaway is that durable value may lie in integration, customer translation, maintenance, and intent rather than model scores alone.
Benchmarking Google Eloquent Exposes Major On-Device Dictation Reliability Issues
r/LocalLLaMA top day47 days agoBenchmarkA LocalLLaMA user tried to benchmark Google’s new fully local dictation app, Eloquent, against open ASR models such as Qwen3-ASR and NVIDIA Parakeet V3. The tester reported that roughly half of dictations returned only fragments, even during manual use. When Eloquent produced complete transcripts, its word error rate was competitive, but the missing-output behavior made the app unreliable for evaluation and practical use.
DiffusionGemma: Google Launches High-Speed Open-Weight Gemma Diffusion Model★ 76
Simon Willison's Weblog47 days agoReleaseSimon Willison highlights Google’s new DiffusionGemma, an Apache 2 licensed open-weight Gemma model. He connects it to last year’s brief Gemini Diffusion preview, which he measured at 857 tokens per second. NVIDIA is currently hosting the model for free on its NIM cloud API, where Willison generated 2,409 tokens in 4.4 seconds, implying at least 500 tokens per second.
Google DeepMind Releases DiffusionGemma: Open Source Model with 4x Local AI Execution Speed Improvement
Ars Technica AI47 days agoReleaseGoogle DeepMind has released DiffusionGemma, an open-source model that brings diffusion-based generation to text tasks. Unlike autoregressive LLMs that generate one token at a time, diffusion models can produce outputs in parallel, dramatically cutting latency. The result is reportedly a 4x speed improvement for local AI inference, making on-device deployment significantly more practical.
DiffusionGemma: 4x faster text generation★ 74
Google DeepMind Blog47 days agoReleaseGoogle’s DiffusionGemma is an Apache 2.0 experimental open model using text diffusion instead of standard autoregressive decoding. The 26B MoE model activates 3.8B parameters during inference and is designed for low-latency local workflows. Google claims up to 4x faster generation on dedicated GPUs, while noting that output quality is below standard Gemma 4 and production-quality use cases should still prefer Gemma 4.
Google will save your Lens photos, Search Live recordings, and Translate audio for AI training
The Verge AI47 days agoEthicsGoogle has notified users via email that it will begin saving multimedia inputs—images from Google Lens, real-time recordings from Search Live, and audio from Translate—under a new 'Search Services History' setting. This data will be retained and potentially used to train and improve Google's AI models. Users concerned about privacy should review their account settings to manage or disable this data collection.
DiffusionGemma: 4x Faster Text Generation
r/LocalLLaMA top day47 days agoReleaseGoogle has announced DiffusionGemma, a text-generation model that applies diffusion-based techniques to the Gemma architecture, claiming speeds four times faster than standard autoregressive generation. Unlike conventional language models that predict tokens one at a time, diffusion-based methods generate text through iterative denoising, enabling parallel output. The release, published on Google's official blog, drew immediate attention from the local-LLM community for its potential inference-efficiency gains.
DiffusionGemma: The Developer Guide — Google Developers Blog
r/LocalLLaMA top day47 days agoTutorialGoogle has released a comprehensive developer guide for DiffusionGemma, a text-generation model that uses masked diffusion rather than autoregressive next-token prediction. Unlike standard Gemma models, DiffusionGemma iteratively denoises a fully masked sequence to produce output, enabling a fundamentally different generation paradigm. The guide targets developers looking to integrate or experiment with diffusion-based LLMs using Google's tooling.
DiffusionGemma: 4x Faster Text Generation★ 76
Hacker News (AI keywords)47 days agoReleaseGoogle released DiffusionGemma, a 26B MoE experimental open model using text diffusion instead of token-by-token autoregressive decoding. It can generate blocks of text in parallel, reaching up to 4x faster output on dedicated GPUs. The model targets local, speed-sensitive workflows, but Google says its output quality is below standard Gemma 4 and recommends Gemma 4 for quality-critical production use.
NotebookLM Upgrades Into an Agent That Proactively Conducts Research★ 72
INSIDE 硬塞 AI48 days agoReleaseGoogle is upgrading NotebookLM from a note-focused assistant into a research agent capable of multi-step work. The updated tool can analyze across documents, search the web, and help automate broader research workflows. It can also export results into formats such as presentations and documents, making it more useful for students, researchers, educators, and content creators who need to move from source material to finished outputs.
Claude Mythos 5 Released: 50 Million Lines of Code in One Day★ 74
量子位 QbitAI48 days agoReleaseQbitAI says Anthropic introduced Claude Fable 5 for general users and Claude Mythos 5 for a small set of trusted users. The article highlights software engineering, long-context work, native vision, memory, and scientific research capabilities. It also focuses on a safety-routing design where Fable 5 downgrades high-risk requests to Claude Opus 4.8 instead of simply refusing.
Gemma 4 12B Unified Audio Loses Speech Attention with Large System Prompts
r/LocalLLaMA top day48 days agoCommentaryA developer building a single-pass voice assistant with Gemma 4 12B unified (encoder-free audio/vision/text model) finds that audio attention collapses once the system prompt grows to ~21k tokens. The model then ignores or hallucinates instead of responding to the spoken input. The issue reproduces identically on vLLM, llama.cpp, and LiteRT-LM, pointing to an architectural attention-saturation limit rather than a stack-specific bug.
Anthropic Claude Fable 5: Mythos-Class Power with Controversial Terms★ 84
Latent Space48 days agoReleaseAnthropic released Claude Fable 5 as its first broadly available Mythos-class model, alongside restricted Mythos 5 access. Benchmarks and ecosystem reports show strong gains in coding, long-horizon agentic tasks, research, and vision. The controversy centers on 30-day retention for Mythos-class traffic and silent interventions that may reduce effectiveness on frontier LLM development tasks, raising trust, reproducibility, and open AI concerns.
German court rules Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews, declaring them Google's own words★ 72
Hacker News (AI keywords)48 days agoRegulationA landmark German court ruling has declared that Google's AI Overviews are legally Google's own words, not neutral third-party aggregations. This makes Google directly liable for false or misleading answers generated by the feature, removing the 'just a tool' defense. The ruling is among the first globally to apply traditional media liability frameworks to generative AI search results.
Google cuts price on its budget AI subscription tier, escalating the AI subscription price wars
TechCrunch AI48 days agoBusinessGoogle has sharply cut the price of its budget AI subscription tier, signaling an aggressive move in the AI subscription price wars. The reduction makes Google's AI services more accessible to cost-sensitive consumers, potentially pressuring rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic. This pricing strategy could trigger a broader competitive response across the AI subscription landscape.
OSCAR RotationZoo - Offline Spectral Covariance-Aware Rotation for 2-bit KV Cache Quantization
r/LocalLLaMA top day48 days agoPaperOSCAR applies offline-precomputed rotation matrices—derived from spectral covariance analysis—to reshape KV tensor distributions before 2-bit quantization, suppressing outliers and reducing rounding error. The rotation adds negligible inference overhead since it requires no runtime learning. GGUF downloads for Gemma-4-12B-it, Qwen3-32B, and Qwen3-4B-Thinking are available, with llama.cpp and sglang integrations and an arXiv paper.
Google announces Gemini 3.5 Live Translate for instant voice-to-voice translation
Ars Technica AI48 days agoNew ToolGoogle has announced Gemini 3.5 Live Translate, a real-time voice-to-voice translation system that preserves the original speaker's tone, pacing, and pitch rather than producing flat synthetic output. The system embeds Google's SynthID watermarks into translated audio, enabling AI content provenance detection without affecting audio quality. This extends Google's Gemini Live multimodal API capabilities into cross-language communication scenarios such as meetings, live streams, and customer service.