EmbeddingGemma 2
EmbeddingGemma 2, an open multimodal embedding model
Google released EmbeddingGemma 2, an open multimodal embedding model, the same week Perplexity opened pplx-embed-v2.
Google DeepMind ships on two tracks we cover almost weekly: the frontier Gemini line and the open-weights Gemma family, plus image, video and science models around them. ThursdAI — the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — has covered 91 Google DeepMind releases since Jan 2025, most recently EmbeddingGemma 2 on Oct 8, 2026. Highlights include Gemini 3 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 3 Flash, Gemma 3 QAT. 11 of them shipped with open weights. Every entry below has the episode segment where we covered it live, plus primary-source links and key numbers where we have them.
EmbeddingGemma 2, an open multimodal embedding model
Google released EmbeddingGemma 2, an open multimodal embedding model, the same week Perplexity opened pplx-embed-v2.
Google Nano Banana 2.1 at $0.0336 per 1K image
Google released Nano Banana 2.1 at $0.0336 per 1K image. Every infographic on the show was made with it, and Alex found it really good on high reasoning.
Google's Gemini 4 Argon tops Text Arena and the Vals Index, trusted testers only
Gemini 4 Argon debuted at #1 on Text Arena and the Vals Index (68.9), but Google is releasing it to government and trusted cyber defenders first. On Arena's agent mode it placed 8th.
Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Flash Lite TTS rank #1 and #2, add voice cloning
Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash TTS and Flash Lite TTS, ranked #1 and #2 on voice quality, with voice cloning from 30 seconds of audio gated by recorded consent and watermarked with SynthID.
Google DeepMind launches the DeepMind Institute with five essays on AGI
Google DeepMind launched the DeepMind Institute, a new institution debuting with five essays, with co-founder Shane Legg writing that AGI is approaching. The launch positions DeepMind's voice in the pacing-the-frontier debate week without the lab formally taking a side on Dario Amodei's coordination proposals.
Gemini 3.8 Live claims #1 on the speech-to-speech index with 97 languages and async tool calls
Google launched Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking, real-time speech-to-speech models scoring 82.6 to take #1 on the speech-to-speech quality index across 97 languages with asynchronous tool calls. Extended Thinking brings longer reasoning into a live model without breaking real-time interaction, and the release reaches everyone on Android and Google Search rather than just API users.
Gemini 3.8 Flash: third Flash in three weeks, HLE-Verified 54.9, 1M context
Google's third Flash iteration in as many weeks, billed as the reasoning and coding workhorse for Googlers who all build on Antigravity internally. It scores 54.9 on HLE-Verified, keeps a 1M-token context, is about 3x faster, and is priced at $0.75/$3.75 per million tokens until a doubling on January 1, 2027. The Wall Street Journal reported Google scrapped the 3.5 Pro checkpoints because Flash overtook them; Gemini 4 is still in post-training.
Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber: Fairwind-only cybersecurity variant, CWE-Bench 47.2%
A dedicated cybersecurity variant of Gemini 3.8 Flash, available only to trusted defenders through Google's Fairwind program. The newsletter lists CWE-Bench at 47.2%; no benchmark numbers surfaced during the show, and Alex questioned who will actually get to use it.
Gemini 3.5 Transcribe launches in live and batch modes, replacing Chirp 3
Google launched Gemini 3.5 Transcribe in public preview with both live (sub-second streaming via the Live API, with WebSocket multi-turn support) and batch modes, reporting 2.6%/4.0% WER per Artificial Analysis. It replaces Chirp 3, shipped with launch-day Pipecat support, and was transcribing the show itself in real time via Alex's GrokBot producer.
Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash tops Arena text-to-video with voice-consistent scene extension
Google's new video model dropped during the show: #1 on Arena's text-to-video leaderboard and #2 on image-to-video. It analyzes up to 10 seconds of previous footage to extend scenes while keeping character identity, voice, and lighting locked; adds first/last-frame control and infinite loops; and offers 360p draft generations with built-in upscaling. Rolling out in Google AI Studio, Flow, and Gemini Enterprise with API access.
Gemini 3.7 Flash: 300+ tok/s mid-tier multimodal with a 50% price cut
Google dropped Gemini 3.7 Flash mid-show, right as Artificial Analysis co-founder George Cameron was on air. The mid-tier model clocks over 300 tokens/sec, comes with a 50% price cut through end of year, beats Muse Spark 1.2 on DeepSWE, and lands near the Pareto frontier for cost per task — instantly #1 on Artificial Analysis' model recommender for the cost/speed/intelligence trade-off. It is also strong at multimodal, one of the few models that can watch videos.
Lyria 3.5 generates full 3-minute songs with BPM and key control inside Flow Music
Google's flagship music model now produces cohesive three-minute songs with tempo and key-signature control in the prompt, more expressive multilingual vocals, style-transfer covers that preserve a track's structure, and lip-synced music videos via Gemini Omni Flash — plus a new Flow Music iOS app. All output is SynthID-watermarked. Google published no benchmarks against Suno or Udio, and early testers say paid Suno 5.5 still edges it, but as a free end-to-end create-to-publish stack it's a real move.
Google ships a three-model Gemini Flash refresh — but still no Gemini 3.5 Pro
Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber. Flash 3.6 is the 'workhorse': 17% lower output-token usage than 3.5 Flash (per Artificial Analysis), output pricing cut from $9.00 to $7.50 per million tokens (input steady at $1.50), 1M-token context with 64K max output, and 58.7% on SWE-Bench Pro. Flash-Lite is the budget tier; Flash Cyber is a vulnerability-hunting model piloted only with governments and trusted partners. Conspicuously absent: Gemini 3.5 Pro, delayed for an architectural rebuild even as Google confirms Gemini 4 is in pre-training.
Google quietly patches Gemma 4 with Flash Attention 4 and tool-calling fixes — no version bump
Google shipped a stealth update to the Gemma 4 family: Flash Attention 4 support on Hopper-class GPUs (a reported 25-70% prefill throughput speedup), tool-calling bug fixes, reduced model 'laziness,' and configurable vision resolution. The ThursdAI panel criticized shipping new weights under the same Gemma 4 name with no version bump, leaving users unsure which checkpoint they're actually running.
Demis Hassabis proposes a FINRA-style Frontier AI Standards Body for AGI governance
Demis Hassabis published 'A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age,' proposing a U.S.-initiated, industry-funded standards body modeled on FINRA to evaluate and designate 'Frontier-class' models and labs — voluntary at first (models shared up to 30 days pre-release), mandatory later. Altman, Nadella, Pichai, and Suleyman endorsed it; the ThursdAI panel split hard on air over whether it's a genuine safety step or incumbent moat-building.
Gemini API Managed Agents add background tasks and remote MCP
Google expanded Managed Agents in the Gemini API with background task support, remote MCP and function calling, and network credential refresh — available on the free tier, positioning Gemini's agent infrastructure directly against OpenAI's agent primitives.
NanoBanana 2 Lite: sub-4-second images at ~3¢ per 1,000
Google's NanoBanana 2 Lite generates images in under four seconds starting at $0.034 per 1,000 images, with quality above the original NanoBanana. The Interactions API hit GA the same week.
Google DeepMind debuts OmniFlash, first of the any-to-any Omni family
OmniFlash — first of Google's any-to-any Omni family — generates videos up to 10 seconds with precise conversational multi-turn editing via the Interactions API: say 'make it daytime' and it redoes light, sky and shadows. Editing Elo 1087 at $0.10 per second of output.
Google drops Gemma 4 12B, an encoder-free multimodal local model
Google released Gemma 4 12B, an encoder-free multimodal model under Apache 2.0 that targets 16GB VRAM local setups. Instead of bolting separate vision or audio encoders onto a language model, it uses one unified network, which LDJ and Yam argued makes smaller multimodal models cheaper, cleaner, and easier to run locally.
Google AI Studio builds free native Android apps; 250K in week one
Google AI Studio now lets anyone build native Android apps for free, with 250,000 apps created in the first week. The crew framed it as another step toward personalized, disposable software that anyone can vibe-code on demand.
Google launches Universal Cart, AP2 and UCP for agentic commerce
Google launched Universal Cart along with the AP2 and UCP protocols, infrastructure that lets AI agents shop and pay on a user's behalf. It is Google's play to standardize agent-driven commerce across merchants and payment flows.
Antigravity 2.0 becomes Google's central agentic coding harness
Antigravity 2.0 was positioned at I/O 2026 as the single agent harness powering agentic experiences across Google, from internal tooling to Search, Workspace and developer products. Born from the Windsurf acquisition, it evolved from an agent-first IDE into the through line for Google's agentic strategy, now exposed to external developers as well.
Gemini 3.5 Flash launches at I/O as Google's agentic workhorse model
Google launched Gemini 3.5 Flash at I/O 2026 as a fast, determined workhorse model built for agentic loops rather than a budget-tier Flash like prior generations. It is rolling out across the Gemini app, Search AI Mode, the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, Antigravity and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. Nisten noted unusual determinism in its behavior, and Logan Kilpatrick framed it as designed for the agentic era.
Gemini Omni: 'create anything from anything' conversational video editor
Google DeepMind launched Gemini Omni, a multimodal 'create anything from anything' model debuting as Google's first conversational video editor. Unlike pure text-to-video systems, Omni is an iterative multi-turn editing model that combines Gemini intelligence, world knowledge, multimodal inputs and generative media, in the same way Nano Banana brought Gemini to interactive image editing. It is available in the Gemini app, Google Flow and YouTube, with API support coming soon.
Gemini API gets Managed Agents with hosted sandboxes and the Interactions API
Google launched Managed Agents in the Gemini API, letting developers spin up hosted Antigravity agents with Linux sandboxes and persistent state. It ships alongside the next-generation Interactions API, which Logan Kilpatrick described as designed for agentic systems rather than the old tokens-in, tokens-out model interaction pattern.
Gemini Spark announced as a 24/7 proactive personal AI agent
Google announced Gemini Spark, a 24/7 personal AI agent that can proactively work across Google surfaces, framed on the show as Google's OpenClaw competitor. Access was not yet broadly available at announcement time, so the crew discussed it from the announcement rather than hands-on testing.
Google Search adds Gemini 3.5 Flash-powered agentic capabilities
Google Search is getting new Gemini 3.5 Flash-powered agentic capabilities, including a new AI-powered Search box and background information agents. The crew framed the rollout as a massive intelligence uplift across one of Google's largest surfaces, with billions of Search users getting frontier-model capabilities.
Gemini can now generate Docs, Sheets, Slides, PDFs from chat
Gemini can now generate and export Docs, Sheets, Slides, PDFs, .docx, .xlsx, and LaTeX files directly from chat. The feature rolled out free for all users globally.
Google ships Gemini Deep Research + Deep Research Max on Gemini 3.1 Pro
Google rolled out an upgraded Gemini Deep Research along with a new Deep Research Max tier, both running on Gemini 3.1 Pro. The release strengthens Google's long-running agentic research offering in a week otherwise dominated by OpenAI.
Google launches Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform
Google announced the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, a platform for building and deploying Gemini-powered agents inside enterprises. It was covered briefly in the Big Co segment of the show.
Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS tops TTS Arena at 1,211 Elo with 70+ languages
Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS, which leads TTS Arena at 1,211 Elo, supports 70+ languages with inline audio tags, and costs about $0.03 per 60 seconds, roughly 5x cheaper than ElevenLabs. Kwindla noted it is fully promptable like an LLM rather than limited to fixed tags, but its ~3 second time-to-first-token makes it batch-only for now rather than usable in live conversational pipelines.
Google releases Gemma 4 open-weights family under Apache 2.0
Google DeepMind's Gemma 4 launch crossed 10M+ downloads with over 1,000 Gemma-4-based fine-tunes on Hugging Face; the Gemma family totals 500M+ downloads. Omar Sanseviero says Gemma is the foundation for the next generation of Gemini Nano shipping on Pixel and Samsung, with the AI Edge gallery letting people run it locally on Android and iOS. It punched above its size on Arena's Pareto curve and is now live on W&B Inference.
Google launches Veo 3.1 Lite at $0.05/sec, cheapest video gen yet
Google released Veo 3.1 Lite, a lighter video generation tier priced at $0.05 per second at 720p, the cheapest video generation offering yet, with further price cuts announced for April 7. The panel framed it as a practical quality-versus-latency tradeoff tier for creator workflows.
Google drops Gemini 3.1 Flash Live: Gemini can see, hear, and talk to you
Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, a realtime multimodal model that handles voice and vision interaction in a single model path instead of stitched pipelines. The panel framed it as a major upgrade for end-to-end voice and vision agents, with AI Studio and API availability as the immediate way to experiment.
Google Lyria 3 Pro generates full 3-minute music tracks with structural control
Google DeepMind released Lyria 3 Pro, its most advanced music model, generating full 3-minute tracks with structural control over intros, verses, choruses, and bridges, and even composing music from images. The crew generated a drum-and-bass ThursdAI opener live with spot-on instruction following; output is SynthID watermarked and royalty-free, available to Gemini subscribers and via Producer AI.
Google TurboQuant claims 6x KV-cache compression and 8x faster inference
Google Research published TurboQuant, a KV-cache quantization technique claiming 6x compression and 8x inference speedup with near-zero accuracy loss. The panel framed it as a potential unlock for LLM inference economics, while calling stock-market panic over the result premature without broader production validation.
Google AI Studio gets full-stack vibe coding with Antigravity and Firebase
Google AI Studio received a full-stack vibe coding overhaul featuring the Antigravity agent, Firebase integration, and multiplayer support. The update pushes AI Studio from a model playground toward a full app-building environment.
Google launches Gemini Embedding 2, a natively multimodal embedder
Google launched Gemini Embedding 2, a natively multimodal embedding model that supports text, image, video, and audio in a single unified embedding space. It is available through the Gemini Embeddings API.
Google launches Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite with 1M context at 360 tok/s
Google launched Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, a fast and cheap model with 1M token context aimed at the instant/fast tier, running around 360 tokens per second. The panel flagged a material pricing jump versus the prior Flash-Lite generation but saw it as well suited for judge, guardrail, and orchestration workloads in agent systems.
Google releases a Google Workspace CLI
Google released a command-line interface for Google Workspace, making Workspace data and actions scriptable from the terminal for developers and agents. Covered briefly in the TL;DR tools segment.
Google DeepMind launches Nano Banana 2 image model mid-show
Google DeepMind announced Nano Banana 2 during the show, a Flash-quality tier of its image model line. Alex broke in mid-TLDR to describe near-Pro image quality at roughly half the price, plus a new image search capability.
Gemini 3.1 Pro drops live with 44% HLE and 77% ARC-AGI at the same price
Google released Gemini 3.1 Pro minutes before the show, claiming 2.5x better abstract reasoning and improved coding and agentic capabilities at the same price point as its predecessor. It scores 44% on Humanity's Last Exam, 77% on ARC-AGI without a custom harness, and 68 on Terminal Bench, putting it at or near state of the art alongside Opus 4.6. In Nisten's live vibe-coding test it was blazingly fast but less polished than Opus 4.6 and Codex output.
Google DeepMind launches Lyria 3 music generation in the Gemini app
Google DeepMind launched Lyria 3, its most advanced AI music generation model, now available in the Gemini app. It generates 32-second high-fidelity music tracks with creative controls and can compose music from uploaded images. Google also published a prompt guide covering vocals, lyrics, and different styles.
Chrome 146 introduces WebMCP, a native browser API for AI agents
Chrome 146 shipped WebMCP, a native browser API that lets AI agents directly interact with web services. It brings Model Context Protocol-style agent access into the browser itself, a notable primitive for the agentic web.
Gemini 3 Deep Think scores 84% on ARC-AGI 2
Google dropped an upgraded Gemini 3 Deep Think mid-show, hitting 84% on ARC-AGI 2 — the biggest single jump in the benchmark's history, up from Opus 4.6's 68% set just one week earlier. It also scored 48.4% on Humanity's Last Exam without tools, taking state of the art on both.
Google launches agentic Auto-Browse in Chrome with Gemini 3
Google unveiled Chrome Auto-Browse with Gemini 3 Nano integration, bringing agentic browsing to Pro and Ultra subscribers in the world's most-used browser with 4 billion daily users. Native browsing avoids Cloudflare bot detection, and Gemini's 2M context window suits long browsing sessions.
Google DeepMind launches Project Genie 3, real-time 24fps world model
Google DeepMind's Genie 3 generates interactive, controllable 3D worlds in real time at 24 frames per second, demoed live on the show with a spaceship exploration and paint persistence on walls. It ships alongside SIMA 2, a self-improving game-playing agent built on Genie 3, and is available to Gemini Ultra subscribers in the US with a one-minute session limit.
Google adds Agentic Vision to Gemini 3 Flash
Gemini 3 Flash gains agentic vision: a Think-Act-Observe loop that can zoom, crop, annotate, and plot images by generating and executing Python code in the backend. Available in the Gemini app, AI Studio, and Vertex AI.
Google releases MedGemma 1.5 for offline medical imaging
Google released MedGemma 1.5, a small (4B-class) open model for medical use cases, compact enough to run offline for medical imaging. The panel stressed it is a different model class from Byte's giant M3 medical LLM and that the two pair well together rather than replacing each other.
Gemini personal intelligence reasons across Gmail, YouTube, Photos, Search
Google shipped personalized AI in Gemini, letting it reason across a user's Gmail, YouTube, Photos, and Search history with explicit opt-in for US Pro and Ultra subscribers. Alex tested it live: it inferred he drives a Tesla Model Y from emails and noticed his recent Honda Odyssey searches, highlighting Google's data moat over OpenAI and Anthropic.
Google brings Gemini 3 into Gmail for 3 billion users
Breaking during the show: Google integrated Gemini 3 into Gmail for 3 billion users, adding AI Overviews, smart replies, and natural language inbox search. It marks one of the largest consumer AI rollouts to date, bringing Gmail into the 'Gemini era.'
Gemini 2.5 takes the #1 benchmark spot in March
Gemini 2.5 briefly claimed the top benchmark position in March, the moment Wolfram identified as the pivotal point where OpenAI stopped being the undisputed leader. It foreshadowed Google's full comeback later in the year.
Google ships a Gemini TTS model in its December run
As part of Google's December release wave, a Gemini TTS model shipped alongside realtime model updates. It rounded out Google's full-stack voice story heading into 2026.
VEO3: native audio video generation crosses the uncanny valley
Google's VEO3 stunned everyone in Q2 with video generation that included native audio, which the crew credits with crossing the uncanny valley for AI video. It was a centerpiece of Google IO 2025 and of Google's comeback year.
FunctionGemma: Google's 270M function-calling model for edge agents
Google released FunctionGemma, a tiny 270M-parameter open model specialized for function calling on-device. With a roughly 500MB RAM footprint and strong gains after fine-tuning for mobile actions, it points toward privacy-first local agents on constrained hardware.
Gemini 3 Flash delivers frontier intelligence at $0.50/1M input tokens
Google launched Gemini 3 Flash, offering frontier-tier capability at flash-tier pricing of $0.50 per million input tokens. It scores 78% on SWE-bench Verified, beating larger models on some agentic tasks, and supports tool-calling at scale with up to 100 simultaneous function calls.
Gemini 3 Deep Think hits 45.1% on ARC-AGI-2 with parallel reasoning
Google shipped Deep Think, a high-cost parallel reasoning mode for Gemini 3 that scored 45.1% on ARC-AGI-2. The panel framed it as Google pressing its advantage in the frontier race, where product integration and latency now matter as much as raw benchmark IQ.
Antigravity: Google's free agent-first IDE powered by Gemini 3 Pro
A free VS Code fork reimagined for agent-first coding, with an inbox-style Agent Manager for running multiple coding agents in parallel across a codebase. Browser integration lets agents control Chrome, take screenshots and videos of the running app, and self-debug. The free tier is powered by Gemini 3 Pro, with GPT-OSS 120B as the open-source alternative and Nano Banana for images.
Gemini 3 Pro launches with record ARC-AGI-2 scores
Google's new frontier multimodal model with a 1M-token context window and huge reasoning gains, scoring 31.11% on ARC-AGI-2 (45.14% with Deep Think mode) — roughly double the previous SOTA — plus 81% on MMLU-Pro and major coding improvements. Amp switched to it as their default model on launch day, the first time they have ever switched defaults. Also rolling out across Gmail, Calendar, and AI Mode in Google Search.
Nano Banana Pro generates 4K images with perfect text
Google's upgraded image model dropped as breaking news mid-show, adding visible thinking traces, 4K resolution output, and SynthID watermarking with C2PA metadata. Alex demoed it live by one-shotting an 8MB AI-news infographic with flawless text and pixel-accurate logos across the entire image. It also powers generative UIs in Gemini, building interactive dashboards with real data on the fly.
Gemini Live gets a conversational voice upgrade
Google rolled out an upgrade to Gemini Live's voice capabilities, making conversations more natural. Covered in the big-companies roundup alongside GPT-5.1 and Grok 4 Fast as the voice interface race heats up.
Google Labs launches Pomelli, an AI marketing agent
Google Labs released Pomelli, an experimental AI marketing agent that generates on-brand campaigns and marketing assets for businesses. It was covered in the tools section as another sign of agents moving into specific professional workflows.
Google AI Studio launches 'Vibe Coding' build experience
Google's Gemini AI Studio launched a 'Vibe Coding' experience at ai.studio/build, letting users build apps from natural-language prompts with Gemini. It puts Google into the rapidly crowding prompt-to-app space alongside the week's other coding-agent moves.
Google's C2S-Scale 27B validates a cancer hypothesis in living cells
Google released C2S-Scale 27B, a Gemma-based single-cell biology model that generated a novel cancer therapy hypothesis later validated in living cells. The show called this a bombshell example of AI contributing to real scientific discovery rather than just benchmarks.
Veo 3.1: Google's next-gen video model launches with cinematic audio
Google DeepMind shipped Veo 3.1, the next version of its video generation model with improved quality and cinematic audio. Senior PM Jessica Gallegos joined the show to discuss how the model and its product packaging (including Flow) are evolving video generation into a real user experience story.
Google puts Gemini in Chrome with cross-tab AI assistance
Google shipped Gemini directly into Chrome, adding an AI assistant that works across tabs, a smarter omnibox, and safer-browsing features. It moves the browser itself into the AI interface race, putting an assistant in front of Chrome's massive user base.
Google releases EmbeddingGemma, a 300M-param SOTA embedding model for RAG
Google released EmbeddingGemma, a 300M-parameter open embedding model that achieves state-of-the-art results for its size, aimed at RAG and on-device semantic search. It dropped as breaking news during the show, with browser-based demos like Semantic Galaxy showing it running fully client-side.
Gemini 2.5 Pro returns to Google's free tier
Google brought Gemini 2.5 Pro back to its free tier, making its flagship reasoning model available again to consumer users at no cost. A quick-hit item in the big-company segment of the show.
AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent for discovering new algorithms
Google DeepMind announced AlphaEvolve, a Gemini-powered coding agent that designs and evolves advanced algorithms, credited on the show as one of the week's mind-bending algorithmic-discovery stories. DeepMind opened an interest form for early access rather than shipping it broadly.
NotebookLM AI Audio Overviews go multilingual with 50+ languages
Google expanded NotebookLM's AI audio overviews (the podcast-style summaries) to support more than 50 languages, taking the feature global beyond its English-only debut.
Google ships Quantization-Aware Trained Gemma 3 models for consumer GPUs
Google released Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) versions of the Gemma 3 family, dramatically cutting memory requirements while preserving quality. The 27B model drops from a hefty 54GB to just 14.1GB, and even the 1B model goes from 2GB to about half a gig, making state-of-the-art open models runnable on consumer GPUs. Wolfram took the 4B QAT model for a spin in LM Studio on the show.
DolphinGemma: Google's audio model for decoding dolphin communication
Google, with Georgia Tech and the Wild Dolphin Project, announced DolphinGemma, a ~400M parameter audio model based on the Gemma architecture using SoundStream audio tokenization. Trained on decades of recorded dolphin clicks, whistles and pulses, it aims to decipher structure in dolphin communication and runs on a Pixel phone for field deployment.
Google launches Gemini 2.5 Flash with controllable thinking budgets
Google answered OpenAI's launch week with Gemini 2.5 Flash, a fast reasoning model that introduces controllable thinking budgets so developers can dial how much the model reasons per request. It is available through the Gemini API and developer platform.
Veo 2 video generation hits GA in the API and Gemini App
Google made Veo 2 video generation generally available for developers and rolled it out in the Gemini App. The GA release brings Google's flagship text-to-video model out of preview and into production use.
Google announces A2A, an open agent-to-agent communication protocol
Google announced the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol at Cloud Next, an open spec for agents from different vendors to discover and communicate with each other. The spec was published on GitHub with a long list of launch partners, including Weights & Biases.
Google announces official support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Demis Hassabis announced that Google will officially support Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) in its models and SDKs. This was a major signal of MCP becoming the industry standard for connecting AI models to tools and data.
Google launches Firebase Studio AI app-building environment at Cloud Next
As part of a flood of announcements at Google Cloud Next 2025, Google launched Firebase Studio, a browser-based AI-powered environment for building and shipping full-stack apps. It was one of the headline developer-facing launches from the event.
Gemini 2.5 Pro scores 24.4% on USAMO olympiad math, crushing the field
New evaluation results published this week showed Gemini 2.5 Pro scoring 24.4% on the USA Math Olympiad (USAMO), problems so hard that most top models score under 5%. The result showcases a step change in frontier reasoning ability on competition mathematics.
Google NotebookLM can now discover related sources for you
Google's NotebookLM added a source discovery feature that finds and suggests related sources for a notebook, instead of relying solely on user-uploaded documents. It extends NotebookLM further into research-assistant territory.
Google reclaims #1 with Gemini 2.5 Pro thinking model
Google dropped Gemini 2.5 Pro, a thinking model that took the #1 spot as the best all-around LLM available, with massive jumps on benchmarks like AIME (up nearly 20 points) and GPQA. It inherits native multimodality and a 1M token context window, maintaining high accuracy even at 120k+ tokens on needle-in-a-haystack tests, with surprisingly low latency (~13 seconds on hard reasoning questions vs 45+ for others). Tulsee Doshi, head of product for Gemini models, joined the show to give the inside scoop.
Gemini Co-Drawing demo uses native image output to help you draw
A Hugging Face space demo, Gemini Co-Drawing, uses Gemini's native image generation output to collaboratively complete and enhance your sketches as you draw. It showcases the new native image-output capability of Gemini 2.0 Flash in an interactive tool.
Google makes Deep Research free, adds Canvas and Live Previews to Gemini
Google made its Deep Research agent free for Gemini users and shipped Canvas, a collaborative workspace with live previews for code and documents. Demos on the show included a playable Tetris game and a markdown word counter built and previewed directly inside Gemini.
NotebookLM teases Mind Maps for visualizing sources
Google's NotebookLM team previewed Mind Maps, a feature that turns your uploaded sources into interactive visual maps of concepts. It was teased publicly by the team this week ahead of a wider rollout.
Google AI Studio adds native YouTube video understanding via link dropping
Google AI Studio now lets you drop a YouTube link and have Gemini natively understand the video. This unlocks video analysis, summarization, and support use cases without downloading or preprocessing the content.
Google makes Deep Research free in the Gemini app, powered by Gemini Thinking
Google made its Deep Research agent free for everyone in the Gemini app and upgraded it to run on Gemini Thinking. In a live test on the show it browsed over 150 websites to compile a comprehensive answer, with a polished interface and export to Google Docs.
Gemini Flash gains native image generation and conversational editing
Google enabled native image generation in Gemini Flash Experimental, letting users generate and iteratively edit images conversationally inside the same multimodal model. The crew demoed it live on stream, editing photos of themselves with natural-language instructions, and saw it as a preview of how creative tools like Photoshop will work.
Google open sources Gemma 3, 1B-27B multimodal family with 128K context
Google released Gemma 3, an open-weights model family spanning 1B to 27B parameters with multimodal (text, image, video) capabilities, support for over 140 languages, and a 128K context window. The 27B model runs on a single GPU, with Sundar Pichai claiming competitors need roughly 10x the compute for similar performance. It shipped with day-one open source ecosystem support (Hugging Face, Ollama, Kaggle) plus ShieldGemma 2 for content moderation.
Google announces AI Mode in Search powered by Gemini 2.0
Google announced AI Mode, a new conversational search experience in Google Search, alongside Gemini 2.0-powered upgrades to AI Overviews. Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, joined the show for an exclusive interview about the launch, which brings full AI chat-style answers with follow-ups directly into Search.
Google ships Gemini-powered Data Science Agent in Colab
Google launched a Data Science Agent inside Google Colab, powered by Gemini, that can autonomously generate complete, working notebooks from natural language descriptions of an analysis task. It automates data loading, exploration, and modeling boilerplate for data scientists.
Google's Veo 2 video model becomes available via FAL API
Google DeepMind's Veo 2 video generation model became accessible to developers through FAL's inference API. This was the first broadly available API access to Veo 2, letting builders generate high-quality video from text prompts without waiting on Google's own product surfaces.
Google ships updated Gemini Flash Thinking with 1M context
Google released an updated Gemini Flash Thinking model (01-21) with a 1 million token context window, built-in code execution, and improved evals over the previous Thinking release. It pushes Google's reasoning-model line forward in the same week DeepSeek R1 landed.
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