An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Like the rest of its Big Tech cadre, Google has spent lavishly on developing generative AI models. Google's AI can clean up your text messages and summarize the web, but the company is constantly looking to prove that its generative AI has true intelligence. The International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) helps make the point. Google says Gemini 2.5 participated in the 2025 ICPC World Finals, turning in a gold medal performance. According to Google this marks "a significant step on our path toward artificial general intelligence."

Every year, thousands of college-level coders participate in the ICPC event, facing a dozen deviously complex coding and algorithmic puzzles over five grueling hours. This is the largest and longest-running competition of its type. To compete in the ICPC, Google connected Gemini 2.5 Deep Think to a remote online environment approved by the ICPC. The human competitors were given a head start of 10 minutes before Gemini began "thinking."

According to Google, it did not create a freshly trained model for the ICPC like it did for the similar International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) earlier this year. The Gemini 2.5 AI that participated in the ICPC is the same general model that we see in other Gemini applications. However, it was "enhanced" to churn through thinking tokens for the five-hour duration of the competition in search of solutions. At the end of the time limit, Gemini managed to get correct answers for 10 of the 12 problems, which earned it a gold medal. Only four of 139 human teams managed the same feat. "The ICPC has always been about setting the highest standards in problem-solving," said ICPC director Bill Poucher. "Gemini successfully joining this arena, and achieving gold-level results, marks a key moment in defining the AI tools and academic standards needed for the next generation." Gemini's solutions are available on GitHub.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The companies seeking to build larger AI models have been increasingly stymied by a lack of high-quality training data. As tech firms scour the web for more data to feed their models, they could increasingly rely on potentially sensitive user data. A team at Google Research is exploring new techniques to make the resulting large language models (LLMs) less likely to 'memorize' any of that content. LLMs have non-deterministic outputs, meaning you can't exactly predict what they'll say. While the output varies even for identical inputs, models do sometimes regurgitate something from their training data -- if trained with personal data, the output could be a violation of user privacy. In the event copyrighted data makes it into training data (either accidentally or on purpose), its appearance in outputs can cause a different kind of headache for devs. Differential privacy can prevent such memorization by introducing calibrated noise during the training phase.

Adding differential privacy to a model comes with drawbacks in terms of accuracy and compute requirements. No one has bothered to figure out the degree to which that alters the scaling laws of AI models until now. The team worked from the assumption that model performance would be primarily affected by the noise-batch ratio, which compares the volume of randomized noise to the size of the original training data. By running experiments with varying model sizes and noise-batch ratios, the team established a basic understanding of differential privacy scaling laws, which is a balance between the compute budget, privacy budget, and data budget. In short, more noise leads to lower-quality outputs unless offset with a higher compute budget (FLOPs) or data budget (tokens). The paper details the scaling laws for private LLMs, which could help developers find an ideal noise-batch ratio to make a model more private. The work the team has done here has led to a new Google model called VaultGemma, its first open-weight model trained with differential privacy to minimize memorization risks. It's built on the older Gemma 2 foundation and sized at 1 billion parameters, which the company says performs comparably to non-private models of similar size.

It's available now from Hugging Face and Kaggle.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, OpenAI's Economic Research Team went a long way toward answering that question, on a population level, releasing a first-of-its-kind National Bureau of Economic Research working paper (in association with Harvard economist David Denning) detailing how people end up using ChatGPT across time and tasks. While other research has sought to estimate this kind of usage data using self-reported surveys, this is the first such paper with direct access to OpenAI's internal user data. As such, it gives us an unprecedented direct window into reliable usage stats for what is still the most popular application of LLMs by far. After digging through the dense 65-page paper, here are seven of the most interesting and/or surprising things we discovered about how people are using OpenAI today. Here are the seven most interesting and surprising findings from the study:

1. ChatGPT is now used by "nearly 10% of the world's adult population," up from 100 million users in early 2024 to over 700 million users in 2025. Daily traffic is about one-fifth of Google's at 2.6 billion GPT messages per day.

2. Long-term users' daily activity has plateaued since June 2025. Almost all recent growth comes from new sign-ups experimenting with ChatGPT, not from established users increasing their usage.

3. 46% of users are aged 18-25, making ChatGPT especially popular among the youngest adult cohort. Factoring in under-18 users (not counted in the study), the majority of ChatGPT users likely weren't alive in the 20th century.

4. At launch in 2022, ChatGPT was 80% male-dominated. By late 2025, the balance has shifted: 52.4% of users are now female.

5. In 2024, work vs. personal use was close to even. By mid-2025, 72% of usage is non-work related -- people are using ChatGPT more for personal, creative, and casual needs than for productivity.

6. 28% of all conversations involve writing assistance (emails, edits, translations). For work-related queries, that jumps to 42% overall, and 52% among business/management jobs. Furthermore, the report found that editing and critiquing text is more common than generating text from scratch.

7. 14.9% of work-related usage is dealt with "making decisions and solving problems." This shows people don't just use ChatGPT to do tasks -- they use it as an advisor or co-pilot to help weigh options and guide choices.

Google has restructured Android's decade-old monthly security update process into a "Risk-Based Update System" that separates high-priority patches from routine fixes. Monthly bulletins now contain only vulnerabilities under active exploitation or in known exploit chains -- explaining July 2025's unprecedented zero-CVE bulletin -- while most patches accumulate for quarterly releases.

The September 2025 bulletin contained 119 vulnerabilities compared to zero in July and six in August. The change reduces OEM workload for monthly updates but extends the private bulletin lead time from 30 days to several months for quarterly releases. The company no longer releases monthly security update source code, limiting custom ROM development to quarterly cycles.

"These are the last days of social media as we know it," argues a humanities lecturer from University College Cork exploring where technology and culture intersect, warning they could become lingering derelicts "haunted by bots and the echo of once-human chatter..."

"Whatever remains of genuine, human content is increasingly sidelined by algorithmic prioritization, receiving fewer interactions than the engineered content and AI slop optimized solely for clicks... " In recent years, Facebook and other platforms that facilitate billions of daily interactions have slowly morphed into the internet's largest repositories of AI-generated spam. Research has found what users plainly see: tens of thousands of machine-written posts now flood public groups — pushing scams, chasing clicks — with clickbait headlines, half-coherent listicles and hazy lifestyle images stitched together in AI tools like Midjourney... While content proliferates, engagement is evaporating. Average interaction rates across major platforms are declining fast: Facebook and X posts now scrape an average 0.15% engagement, while Instagram has dropped 24% year-on-year. Even TikTok has begun to plateau. People aren't connecting or conversing on social media like they used to; they're just wading through slop, that is, low-effort, low-quality content produced at scale, often with AI, for engagement.

And much of it is slop: Less than half of American adults now rate the information they see on social media as "mostly reliable" — down from roughly two-thirds in the mid-2010s... Platforms have little incentive to stem the tide. Synthetic accounts are cheap, tireless and lucrative because they never demand wages or unionize. Systems designed to surface peer-to-peer engagement are now systematically filtering out such activity, because what counts as engagement has changed. Engagement is now about raw user attention — time spent, impressions, scroll velocity — and the net effect is an online world in which you are constantly being addressed but never truly spoken to.
"These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content," the article suggests, "but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care..." Social media giants have stopped growing exponentially, while a significant proportion of 18- to 34-year-olds even took deliberate mental health breaks from social media in 2024, according to an American Psychiatric Association poll.) And "Some creators are quitting, too. Competing with synthetic performers who never sleep, they find the visibility race not merely tiring but absurd."

Yet his 5,000-word essay predicts social media's death rattle "will not be a bang but a shrug," since "the model is splintering, and users are drifting toward smaller, slower, more private spaces, like group chats, Discord servers and federated microblogs — a billion little gardens." Intentional, opt-in micro-communities are rising in their place — like Patreon collectives and Substack newsletters — where creators chase depth over scale, retention over virality. A writer with 10,000 devoted subscribers can potentially earn more and burn out less than one with a million passive followers on Instagram... Even the big platforms sense the turning tide. Instagram has begun emphasizing DMs, X is pushing subscriber-only circles and TikTok is experimenting with private communities. Behind these developments is an implicit acknowledgement that the infinite scroll, stuffed with bots and synthetic sludge, is approaching the limit of what humans will tolerate....

The most radical redesign of social media might be the most familiar: What if we treated these platforms as public utilities rather than private casinos...? Imagine social media platforms with transparent algorithms subject to public audit, user representation on governance boards, revenue models based on public funding or member dues rather than surveillance advertising, mandates to serve democratic discourse rather than maximize engagement, and regular impact assessments that measure not just usage but societal effects... This could take multiple forms, like municipal platforms for local civic engagement, professionally focused networks run by trade associations, and educational spaces managed by public library systems... We need to "rewild the internet," as Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon mentioned in a Noema essay.

We need governance scaffolding, shared institutions that make decentralization viable at scale... [R]eal change will come when platforms are rewarded for serving the public interest. This could mean tying tax breaks or public procurement eligibility to the implementation of transparent, user-controllable algorithms. It could mean funding research into alternative recommender systems and making those tools open-source and interoperable. Most radically, it could involve certifying platforms based on civic impact, rewarding those that prioritize user autonomy and trust over sheer engagement.
"Social media as we know it is dying, but we're not condemned to its ruins. We are capable of building better — smaller, slower, more intentional, more accountable — spaces for digital interaction, spaces..."

"The last days of social media might be the first days of something more human: a web that remembers why we came online in the first place — not to be harvested but to be heard, not to go viral but to find our people, not to scroll but to connect. We built these systems, and we can certainly build better ones."

America's Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Amazon and Google misled advertisers placing ads on their websites, reports Bloomberg, and specifically whether the two companies "properly disclosed the terms and pricing for ads." The FTC is seeking details about Amazon's auctions and whether it disclosed "reserve pricing" for some search ads — price floors that advertisers must meet before they can buy an ad, the people said. Separately, the FTC is examining practices by Google, including its internal pricing process and whether it increased the cost of ads in ways that weren't disclosed to advertisers, the people said...

According to one of the people, the FTC's latest investigation emerged from its earlier antitrust case. In that complaint, the agency alleges that Amazon litters its marketplace with irrelevant results for search queries, making it harder for shoppers to find what they are looking for and more expensive for sellers to use the platform. The practice effectively forces sellers to buy ads to make their product appear in response to consumer searches.

Newfoundland and Labrador's 10-year Education Accord report (PDF) intended to guide school reform has been found to contain at least 15 fabricated citations, including references to non-existent films and journals. Academics suggest the fake sources may have been generated by AI. "There are sources in this report that I cannot find in the MUN Library, in the other libraries I subscribe to, in Google searches. Whether that's AI, I don't know, but fabricating sources is a telltale sign of artificial intelligence," said Aaron Tucker, an assistant professor at Memorial whose current research focuses on the history of AI in Canada. "The fabrication of sources at least begs the question: did this come from generative AI?" CBC News reports: In one case, the report references a 2008 movie from the National Film Board called Schoolyard Games. The film doesn't exist, according to a spokesperson for the board. But the exact citation used in the report can be found in a University of Victoria style guide -- a document that clearly lists fake references designed as templates for researchers writing a bibliography. "Many citations in this guide are fictitious," reads the first page of the document.

"Errors happen. Made-up citations are a totally different thing where you essentially demolish the trustworthiness of the material," said Josh Lepawsky, the former president of the Memorial University Faculty Association who resigned from the report's advisory board last January, citing a "deeply flawed process" leading to "top-down" recommendations. The 418-page Education Accord NL report took 18 months to complete and was unveiled Aug. 28 by its co-chairs Anne Burke and Karen Goodnough, both professors at Memorial's Faculty of Education. The pair released the report alongside Education Minister Bernard Davis. "We are investigating and checking references, so I cannot respond to this at the moment," wrote Goodnough in an email declining an interview Thursday. In a statement, the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development said it was aware of a "small number of potential errors in citations" in the report. "We understand that these issues are being addressed, and that the online report will be updated in the coming days to rectify any errors."

Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non-binding deal to restructure their partnership, paving the way for OpenAI to shift into a conventional for-profit model and potentially go public. Reuters reports: Details on the new commercial arrangements were not disclosed, but the companies said they were working to finalize terms of a definitive agreement. [...] Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and another $10 billion at the beginning of 2023. Under their previous agreement, Microsoft had exclusive rights to sell OpenAI's software tools through its Azure cloud computing platform and had preferred access to the startup's technology.

Microsoft was once designated as OpenAI's sole compute provider, though it lessened its grip this year to allow OpenAI to pursue its own data center project, Stargate, including signing $300 billion worth of long-term contracts with Oracle, as well as another cloud deal with Google. As OpenAI's revenue grows into the billions, it is seeking a more conventional corporate structure and partnerships with additional cloud providers to expand sales and secure the computing capacity needed to meet demand. Microsoft, meanwhile, wants continued access to OpenAI's technology even if OpenAI declares its models have reached humanlike intelligence - a milestone that would end the current partnership under existing terms.

OpenAI said under current terms, its nonprofit arm will receive more than $100 billion -- about 20% of the $500 billion valuation it is seeking in private markets -- making it one of the most well-funded nonprofits, according to a memo from Bret Taylor, chairman of OpenAI's current nonprofit board. The companies did not disclose how much of OpenAI Microsoft will own, nor whether Microsoft will retain exclusive access to OpenAI's latest models and technology. Regulatory hurdles remain for OpenAI, as attorneys general in California and Delaware need to approve OpenAI's new structure. The company hopes to complete the conversion by year's end, or risk losing billions in funding tied to that timeline.

Smart glasses development has expanded beyond Meta, Google and Apple to include dozens of manufacturers across three distinct categories, UploadVR reports. HTC launched its Vive Eagle glasses in Taiwan this month at $550, while Solos' AirGo V2 arrives in Q4 2025 for $300.

The market segments into displayless models featuring cameras and AI assistants, heads-up display glasses providing contextual information overlays and true AR glasses capable of spatial object positioning. Chinese manufacturers dominate the sub-$100 segment. Snap plans consumer AR glasses for 2026. Amazon is reportedly developing two HUD models targeting delivery drivers and consumers for mid-2026 release.

A anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft AI launched its first in-house models last month, adding to the already complicated relationship with its OpenAI partner. Now, Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman says the company is making "significant investments" in the compute capacity required to Microsoft's own future frontier models.

"We should have the capacity to build world class frontier models in house of all sizes, but we should be very pragmatic and use other models where we need to," said Suleyman during Microsoft's employee-only town hall on Thursday. "We're also going to be making significant investments in our own cluster, so today MAI-1-preview was only trained on 15,000 H100s, a tiny cluster in the grand scheme of things."

Suleyman hinted that Microsoft has ambitions to train models that are comparable to Meta, Google, and xAI's efforts on clusters that are "six to ten times larger in size" than what Microsoft used for its MAI-1-preview. "Much more to do, but it's good to take the first steps," said Suleyman.

Google Tables, a work-tracking tool and competitor to the popular spreadsheet-database hybrid Airtable, is shutting down. TechCrunch: In an email sent to Tables users this week, Google said the app will not be supported after December 16, 2025, and advised that users export or migrate their data to either Google Sheets or AppSheet instead, depending on their needs.

Launched in 2020, Tables focused on making project tracking more efficient with automation. It was one of the many projects to emerge from Google's in-house app incubator, Area 120, which at the time was devoted to cranking out a number of experimental projects. Some of these projects later graduated to become a part of Google's core offerings across Cloud, Search, Shopping, and more. Tables was one of those early successes: Google said in 2021 that the service was moving from a beta test to become an official Google Cloud product. At the time, the company said it saw Tables as a potential solution for a variety of use cases, including project management, IT operations, customer service tracking, CRM, recruiting, product development and more.

Microsoft has eliminated the one-time fee for publishing apps on its Windows Store. According to The Verge, "Individual developers in nearly 200 countries can now sign up to publish apps on the Microsoft Store with just a personal Microsoft account, and no more one-time fees." From the report: Microsoft started cutting its $19 one-time fee to publish apps to its Windows store in June in certain markets, and it's now essentially removing this fee for all developers worldwide. Apple still charges an annual $99 fee to developers, and Google charges a one-time registration fee of $25.

"Developers will no longer need a credit card to get started, removing a key point of friction that has affected many creators around the world," explains Chetna Das, senior product manager at Microsoft. "By eliminating these one-time fees, Microsoft is creating a more inclusive and accessible platform that empowers more developers to innovate, share and thrive on the Windows ecosystem." [...]

The Microsoft Store is now used by more than 250 million monthly active users, according to Microsoft. Microsoft is now encouraging more developers to make use of the store, where they can publish a variety of Win32, UWP, PWA, .NET, MAUI, or Electron apps. Developers can even use their own in-app commerce system to keep 100 percent of their revenues on non-gaming apps.

Amid yesterday's news of Oracle's soaring stock, which propelled founder Larry Ellison to the top of the world's richest list, the Wall Street Journal reported that the cloud giant and OpenAI have struck one of the largest cloud contracts ever signed. Under the deal, OpenAI will purchase $300 billion worth of compute power from Oracle over roughly five years, with purchases beginning in 2027.

"This move away from Microsoft was timed with OpenAI's involvement with the Stargate Project, in which OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle have committed to invest $500 billion into domestic data center projects over the next four years," notes TechCrunch.

OpenAI also recently signed a cloud deal with Google. "The deal ... underscores the fact that the two are willing to overlook heavy competition between them to meet the massive computing demands," wrote analyst in Reuter's report.

Google is updating Gmail with a new Purchases tab that collects all delivery-related emails in one place, along with package-tracking cards at the top of the inbox for shipments arriving that day. Engadget reports: Each card comes with a "See item" or a "Track Package" button that you can click or tap without having to search for the original delivery email. The new delivery tab will start showing up in your personal Gmail accounts starting today.

In addition, Google is updating Gmail's Promotions tab, allowing you to sort the emails in it by "most relevant." Gmail will decide which brands and emails are most relevant for you based on what you've interacted with the most in the past. It will also send you "nudges" on upcoming deals and offers that are set to expire soon. You'll see the changes to the Promotions tab in the coming weeks.

Scammers are extorting small businesses worldwide by threatening to flood their Google Maps profiles with fake one-star reviews or demanding payment to remove reviews already posted, according to The New York Times. Fraudsters target service businesses dependent on online ratings -- movers, roofers, contractors -- demanding hundreds of dollars per incident. The Times story documents many cases, including of one Los Angeles contractor Natalia Piper, who paid $250 to multiple scammers after her rating plummeted from 5.0 to 3.6 stars.

Industry watchdog Fake Review Watch documented over 150 affected businesses globally. The scammers typically operate from Pakistan and Bangladesh using WhatsApp to contact victims. Google removes most fraudulent content but offers no direct support channel for targeted businesses.

A group led by RSS co-creator Eckart Walther has launched a new protocol designed to standardize and scale licensing of online content for AI training. Backed by publishers like Reddit, Quora, Yahoo, and Medium, Real Simple Licensing (RSL) combines machine-readable terms in robots.txt with a collective rights organization, aiming to do for AI training data what ASCAP did for music royalties. However, it remains to be seen whether AI labs will agree to adopt it. TechCrunch reports: According to RSL co-founder Eckart Walther, who also co-created the RSS standard, the goal was to create a training-data licensing system that could scale across the internet. "We need to have machine-readable licensing agreements for the internet," Walther told TechCrunch. "That's really what RSL solves."

For years, groups like the Dataset Providers Alliance have been pushing for clearer collection practices, but RSL is the first attempt at a technical and legal infrastructure that could make it work in practice. On the technical side, the RSL Protocol lays out specific licensing terms a publisher can set for their content, whether that means AI companies need a custom license or to adopt Creative Commons provisions. Participating websites will include the terms as part of their "robots.txt" file in a prearranged format, making it straightforward to identify which data falls under which terms.

On the legal side, the RSL team has established a collective licensing organization, the RSL Collective, that can negotiate terms and collect royalties, similar to ASCAP for musicians or MPLC for films. As in music and film, the goal is to give licensors a single point of contact for paying royalties and provide rights holders a way to set terms with dozens of potential licensors at once. A host of web publishers have already joined the collective, including Yahoo, Reddit, Medium, O'Reilly Media, Ziff Davis (owner of Mashable and Cnet), Internet Brands (owner of WebMD), People Inc., and The Daily Beast. Others, like Fastly, Quora, and Adweek, are supporting the standard without joining the collective.

Notably, the RSL Collective includes some publishers that already have licensing deals -- most notably Reddit, which receives an estimated $60 million a year from Google for use of its training data. There's nothing stopping companies from cutting their own deals within the RSL system, just as Taylor Swift can set special terms for licensing while still collecting royalties through ASCAP. But for publishers too small to draw their own deals, RSL's collective terms are likely to be the only option.

Amazon's Zoox officially launched its driverless robotaxi service in Las Vegas with free rides from a few select locations. "Riders will eventually have to pay, but Zoox said it's waiting on regulatory approval to take that step," notes CNBC. A broader rollout is expected in the coming months. From the report: ... unlike Waymo and Tesla, Zoox's electric robotaxi doesn't resemble a car. There's no steering wheel or pedals, and the rectangular shape has led many in the industry to describe it as a toaster on wheels. Zoox co-founder and technology chief Jesse Levinson says, "We use robotaxi or vehicle or Zoox." "You can shoehorn a robotaxi into something that used to be a car. It's just not an ideal solution," Levinson told CNBC in an interview in Las Vegas. "We wanted to do that hard work and take the time and invest in that, and then bring something to market that's just much better than a car."

Zoox was founded in 2014, five years after Google formed the project that became Waymo. Following Las Vegas, the company said it plans to debut an early rider program in San Francisco before the end of the year. The company has been testing a fleet of 50 robotaxis in San Francisco and Las Vegas. Austin and Miami will be Zoox's next locations, the company said. Zoox will soon begin testing robotaxis in those markets, and said it's already driving retrofitted test vehicles in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Seattle. "We think it's very, very early days, and the future is not written yet," said Levinson, during a demo ride with CNBC.

Zoox's Las Vegas depot spans 190,000 square feet, which is about the size of three football fields. At the facility, the company houses the dozens of vehicles set to start operating around the city. Smartphone users will be able to order them from Top Golf, Area15, Resorts World Las Vegas, New York-New York Hotel & Casino and Luxor Hotel & Casino. The robotaxi features two rows of seats that face each other and can transport up to four people at a time. The front and rear are identical, with bidirectional wheels that allow it to move forward or backward without turning around. The vehicle can run for 16 hours on a single charge. Floor-to-ceiling windows provide a sightseeing experience for passengers who want a clear view of the endless rows of casinos. But the interior design is meant to enable easy conversation with fellow riders. "It's not a retrofitted car," said Zoox CEO Aicha Evans. "It's built from the ground up around the rider."

Apple's newly launched iPhone Air will ship globally without physical SIM card slots. The move follows the company previously eliminating SIM trays in US models starting in 2022.

Global consultancy firm Roland Berger forecasts eSIM connections will reach 75% of smartphone connections by 2030, rising from 10% in 2023. CCS Insight predicts eSIM-capable handsets will increase from 1.3 billion to 3 billion by 2030. Google offers eSIM-only Pixel 10 models in the US.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian revealed the company has already made billions from AI by monetizing through consumption-based pricing, subscriptions, and upselling. "Our backlog is now at $106 billion -- it is growing faster than our revenue," said Kurian, speaking at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Technology Conference in San Francisco. "More than 50% of it will convert to revenue over the next two years." CNBC reports: Kurian said some people pay Google by consumption, giving the example of AI infrastructure purchased by enterprise customers. "Whether it's a GPU, TPU or a model, you pay by token -- meaning you pay by what you use," he said. Tokens represent chunks of text that a AI models process when they generate or interpret language. Some people use customer service systems, paying for it by what Kurian called "deflection rates." Such rates are priced based on the business value customers get -- things like uptime, scalability, AI features and security. Google Cloud also provides tools like a "deflection dashboard," that customers can use to track and manage agent interactions. Last month, Google won a $10 billion cloud contract from Meta spanning six years. Meta had largely been reliant on Amazon Web Services for cloud infrastructure, though it also uses Microsoft Azure.

Some customers pay for cloud services by way of subscriptions. "You pay per user per monthly fee -- for example, agents or Workspace," said Kurian, referring to the company's Gemini products, which has its own subscription tiers with various storage options, and the Google Workspace productivity suite, which also has several subscription tiers. Google One, a popular personal cloud storage subscription, offers a basic monthly service to users for $1.99 a month. Earlier this year, the company offered a new subscription tier called "Google AI Ultra," which offers exclusive access to the company's most "cutting edge" AI products with 30 terabytes of storage for $249.99 per month. Kurian gave an example of Google Cloud's cybersecurity subscription tiers, saying "we've seen huge growth in that."

Kurian said that upselling is another key aspect of Google Cloud's strategy. "We also upsell people as they use more of it from one version to another because we have higher quality models and higher-priced tiers," Kurian said. He said that once customers use Google's AI services, they wind up using more of the company's products. "That leads customers who sign a commitment or contract to spend more than they contacted for, which drives more revenue growth," he added. Kurian says it is capturing new customers more quickly too. "We've seen 28% sequential quarter-over-quarter growth in new customer wins in the first half of the year," said Kurian, adding that nearly two-thirds of customers already use Google Cloud's AI tools in a meaningful way. "Selling to existing customers is always easier than selling to new customers, so it helps us improve the cost of sales," Kurian said.

Google rolled out three big Gemini updates: the app now supports audio uploads (with tiered limits for free vs. paid users), Search gains AI Mode in five new languages, and NotebookLM expands to generate reports, study guides, quizzes, and other formats in over 80 languages. The Verge reports: According to a Monday post on X by Josh Woodward, vice president of Google Labs and Gemini, audio file compatibility was the "#1 request" to the Gemini app. Free Gemini users max out at 10 minutes of audio, and five free prompts each day. AI Pro or AI Ultra users, meanwhile, can upload audio up to three hours in length. All Gemini prompts accommodate up to 10 files across various file formats, including within ZIP files.

Additionally, Google Search's AI Mode has rolled out five new language options: Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese, thanks to the integration of Gemini 2.5 with Search, according to a company blog: "With this expansion, more people can now use AI Mode to ask complex questions in their preferred language, while exploring the web more deeply." The Gemini-powered NotebookLM software is also getting an update in the form of new report styles in over 80 languages based on a user's uploaded documents, files, and other media.