Google is adding a “Simplify” feature for iOS users that uses AI to translate complex or technical text into language that aims to be easy to understand. Simplify leverages what Google calls “a novel prompt refinement approach developed by Google Research,” drawing on the company’s proprietary AI, Gemini, to make complicated writing “digestible — without losing key details.” Google’s research indicates people find Simplify’s plainspeak “significantly more helpful than the original complex text” and improved retention. “Simplify uses AI to make dense text on the web easier to understand — without leaving a web page,” Google explains. Continue reading Google Simplify App Makes Tough Text Easier to Understand

Google has quietly launched a film and television production initiative called “100 Zeroes” to fund projects (initially from respected indie studios) that are positive about tech and could help promote a positive take on Google’s own products and services. Google is teaming with talent management and production company Range Media Partners on the initiative. While product placement is expected to be one element (for example: a movie character uses an Android device rather than an iPhone), Google is reportedly more focused on a broader plan to promote a general positive view on technology, especially to younger demographics such as Gen Z. Continue reading Google Launches Initiative for Positive Film, TV Views on Tech

As part of a larger push to boost its global subscriptions, Google’s YouTube is pilot-testing a discounted two-person Premium plan with select users in France, Hong Kong, India and Taiwan. The tier’s pilot program, which allows users to share their YouTube Premium or YouTube Music Premium membership with another household member (13 years or older) without committing to a family plan, comes as the platform looks to diversity beyond its advertising business. YouTube is testing whether the plan, similar to the Duo offering from music streamer Spotify, would be appealing to couples or roommates looking to minimize costs while maintaining separate accounts. Continue reading YouTube Tests Two-Person Premium Tier to Help Grow Subs

China’s Alibaba Group has released a Qwen3 LLM series said to be at the leading edge of open-source models, nearly achieving the performance of proprietary models from AI competitors OpenAI and Google. Alibaba says Qwen3 offers improvements in reasoning, tool use, instruction following and multilingual abilities. The Qwen3 series features eight new models — two that are mixture-of-experts and six built on dense neural networks. Their sizes range from 600 million to 235 billion parameters. The size and scope of the Alibaba slate maintains China’s accelerated AI pace in the wake of DeepSeek’s game-changing debut. Continue reading Alibaba Touts Advance in Open-Source AI with Qwen3 Series

YouTube is testing a new AI Overviews feature for search and discovery powered by Gemini. A “small number” of YouTube Premium subscribers in the U.S. will notice a video results carousel popping up for some English-language search queries. The feature taps AI to highlight clips from videos deemed most helpful for a particular search. Initially, the feature will appear in response to practical inquiries, aiming for a more helpful response to things like product inquiries and requests for information about a place or activity. The idea is to provide quick highlights from several videos. Continue reading YouTube Testing Gemini-Powered AI Overviews for Searches

News from Adobe MAX London 2025 spanned new Firefly image models to a refreshed web app that includes third-party image generators, an AI agent that automates Photoshop, an updated Firefly mobile app coming soon to iOS and Android, and the Firefly Video model in general release. The latest release of Firefly “unifies AI-powered tools for image, video, audio, and vector generation into a single, cohesive platform and introduces many new capabilities,” according to Adobe, which says that since its debut nearly two years ago, creatives have used Firefly to generate more than 22 billion assets worldwide. Continue reading Adobe Unveils Two New Image Models and Array of Products

Nvidia has released NeMo microservices into general availability with version 25.4, pivoting its profile from a modular toolkit for creating custom generative AI models to emphasizing it as a platform for building AI agents at scale. As AI agents have become an in-demand commodity, Nvidia is leveraging the fact that NeMo’s capabilities seem purpose built to help them grow and thrive. Built around the Kubernetes open-source container management system, NeMo microservices are offered as “an end-to-end developer platform for creating state-of-the-art agentic AI systems,” according to Nvidia. Continue reading Nvidia Positions Its NeMo Microservices for AI Agent-Building

Alphabet revenue was $90.2 billion in Q1, a 12 percent increase year-over-year that reflects “robust momentum” across Google Search and YouTube ads and Google Cloud, each delivering double-digit growth rates. Google Cloud was up 28 percent to $12.3 billion in divisions including AI infrastructure and generative AI solutions. Net profit surged 46 percent to $34.5 billion while operating income grew 20 percent to $30.6 billion. Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said the quarter was “super exciting” due to breakthroughs in performance by Gemini 2.5, calling it “our most intelligent AI” and a strong foundation “for future innovation.” Continue reading Alphabet Profit Is Up 46 Percent, Driven by AI and Advertising

Since launching in 2005, YouTube has hosted more than 20 billion videos including music, shorts and podcasts. Now, to celebrate its 20th birthday, the original video streamer is celebrating by sharing stats, unveiling new features and hiding Easter eggs. In the coming weeks, YouTube TV members will be able to “experiment with building their own multiview” with non-sports content and more creators will be able to voice-reply to comments on their videos, something started as a small test last year. Then, this summer, YouTube’s TV app will unveil a makeover. Continue reading YouTube Adds Features to Celebrate 20 Years, 20 Billion Vids

OpenAI has released two new AI models that use images as part of their reasoning process, “thinking with images.” OpenAI o3 and o4-mini “are the smartest models we’ve released to date, representing a step change in ChatGPT’s capabilities for everyone from curious users to advanced researchers,” the company says. The new entries in the “o” series also have agentic capabilities and can independently “use and combine every tool within ChatGPT, including searching the web, analyzing uploaded files and other data with Python, reasoning deeply about visual inputs, and even generating images.” Continue reading OpenAI Introduces New Models That Can Reason with Images

Agentic AI company Moveworks has opened an AI Agent Marketplace that launches with more than 100 pre-built agents, enabling users to discover, install, and deploy AI assistants that automate business processes. Agentic AI is booming, as businesses seek to offload tasks from human workers to software. To support that, new companies and existing ones have started providing pre-built agents that are more convenient than building them from scratch. “What once took weeks to build can now be installed and deployed in mere minutes,” Moveworks says, touting its library offerings. Continue reading Moveworks Joins Competition in Offering Enterprise AI Agents

Anthropic has upgraded its AI assistant Claude, adding Research, an autonomous capability that integrates with Google Workspace. Claude can now search and reference content in Google Docs as well as communications in Gmail and events in Calendar. “With Research, Claude can search across both your internal work context and the web to help you make decisions and take action faster than before,” Anthropic explains, turning the model into a “true virtual collaborator” for enterprise clients. The expansion puts Anthropic into more direct competition with OpenAI and Microsoft as well as Google with Gemini in the AI productivity space. Continue reading Anthropic Adds Deep Research, Google Integration to Claude

OpenAI has launched a new series of multimodal models dubbed GPT-4.1 that represent what the company says is a leap in small model performance, including longer context windows and improvements in coding and instruction following. Geared to developers and available exclusively via API (not through ChatGPT), the 4.1 series comes in three variations: in addition to the flagship GPT‑4.1, GPT‑4.1 mini and GPT‑4.1 nano, OpenAI’s first nano model. Unlike Web-connected models (which have “retrieval-augmented generation,” or RAG) and can access up-to-date information, they are static knowledge models. Continue reading OpenAI’s Affordable GPT-4.1 Models Place Focus on Coding

Among the many tech advancements unveiled at Google Cloud Next include a major generative media upgrade to Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s managed AI development platform. The new Vertex AI Media Studio lets enterprise users generate complete videos from scratch using text prompts. Lyria, Google’s text-to-music model is now available on Vertex in private preview. Both are subject to an “allowlist.” Chirp 3 now creates custom voices with just 10 seconds of audio input, while Imagen 3 has gained improved abilities for reconstructing missing or damaged portions of an image. Continue reading Vertex AI Movie Studio Can Create Videos from Start to Score

Google has debuted a new accelerator chip, Ironwood, a tensor processing unit designed specifically for inference — the ability of AI to predict things. Ironwood will power Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer, which runs the company’s Gemini models and is gearing up for the next generation of artificial intelligence workloads. Google’s TPUs are similar to the accelerator GPUs sold by Nvidia, but unlike the GPUs they’re designed for AI and geared toward speeding neural network tasks and mathematical operations. Google says when deployed at scale Ironwood is more than 24 times more powerful than the world’s fastest supercomputer. Continue reading Google Ironwood TPU is Made for Inference and ‘Thinking’ AI