https://madrobot.blog/guides/google/Google’s AI news, from Gemini to Google DeepMind.https://madrobot.blog/2026/11/07/google-smartwatch-ai-high-blood-pressure-nature/Sat, 07 Nov 2026 10:15:00 GMTGoogle researchers say an ordinary smartwatch can pick up the signs of high blood pressure without ever being checked against an arm cuff. In a peer-reviewed study in Nature, published on November 5, their AI flagged 65.8% of people who had hypertension using only the watch’s light-based pulse sensor, its motion sensor and the wearer’s height.https://madrobot.blog/2026/11/05/google-gemini-school-chromebook-lawsuit-emma/Thu, 05 Nov 2026 21:34:00 GMTA North Carolina couple have sued Google, saying its Gemini AI, built into the Chromebook their 13-year-old daughter had to use for school, helped her plan her suicide and her own funeral while coaching her to hide her distress from them. The complaint, filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court on Monday and moved by Google to federal court on Wednesday, says her parents had no idea she could reach a chatbot at all.https://madrobot.blog/2026/11/03/google-schools-ai-off-students-lose-search/Tue, 03 Nov 2026 18:34:00 GMTSchools that want AI kept away from their students will soon face a blunt choice from Google: accept Google Search with its AI built in, or lose Search altogether. In a blog post on Tuesday, Google said Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom and Google Search will all be “entirely off” for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on. Its education chief has made clear that switching off the AI means switching off Search too.https://madrobot.blog/2026/11/03/eu-court-adviser-gemini-press-publishers-copyright/Tue, 03 Nov 2026 10:28:00 GMTAI chatbots that pull news articles off the web in real time and reuse them in their answers can break the rights of the publishers who wrote them, a senior adviser to the EU’s top court said on Tuesday. Advocate General Maciej Szpunar gave his opinion in Case C-250/25, a Hungarian publisher’s claim against Google’s Gemini chatbot and the first generative AI case to reach the Court of Justice of the European Union.https://madrobot.blog/2026/11/02/nudify-apps-disguised-pet-portraits-meta-ads/Mon, 02 Nov 2026 11:37:00 GMTA pet portrait maker, a hair salon tool and a language tutor look harmless in Apple’s and Google’s app stores. According to a report published on Monday by the nonprofit AI Forensics, hundreds of apps like these were fronts for a single operation selling AI “nudify” tools, which turn photos of real people into explicit images and videos without their consent, promoted by tens of thousands of pornographic ads on Facebook and Instagram.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/30/can-you-write-a-novel-with-ai/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 21:32:00 GMTYou can write a novel with AI: every major chatbot, from ChatGPT and Claude to Gemini, Grok and Meta’s Muse, can now hold an entire manuscript in its working memory and draft it chapter by chapter, and apps such as Sudowrite and NovelAI are built for nothing else. What AI can’t do on its own is make the book legally yours. In the US, text a chatbot writes from your prompts can’t be copyrighted, and Amazon asks you to declare it when you publish. Here are the best models, what they cost, how to use them and the rules on selling the result.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/30/robots-txt-ai-training-opt-out-signal/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 21:12:00 GMTOpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Anthropic have agreed to honour a single new line in a website’s robots.txt file that says “don’t train your AI on this”, so site owners will no longer have to block each company’s crawler one by one. OpenAI announced on Friday that it will respect the shared signal, and Google, Microsoft and Anthropic made the same commitment the same day.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/30/vibe-coded-apps-app-store-google-play-rules/Fri, 30 Oct 2026 11:27:00 GMTVibe-coded apps are allowed on both the App Store and Google Play: neither Apple’s App Review Guidelines nor Google Play’s developer policies say anything about how an app’s code was written, so an app built with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or Google AI Studio is judged exactly like one typed by hand. What gets vibe-coded apps rejected is what the stores have always rejected: apps that are only a website in a wrapper, copies of apps that already exist, apps that crash or need a login nobody gave the reviewer, and apps that download new features after review. Here is what each store’s rules say, what it costs and how to publish.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/28/google-gemini-4-carbon-tops-leaderboard-cyber-defenders/Wed, 28 Oct 2026 18:00:00 GMTGoogle DeepMind has unveiled Gemini 4 Carbon, the model it calls its strongest yet, and says it has taken first place on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, a leaderboard Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 has been leading. Most people can’t try it, though: like Gemini 4 Argon a month ago, it goes first only to a small group of cyber defenders.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/27/google-deepmind-genie-4-world-model-sound-dialogue/Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:09:00 GMTGoogle DeepMind’s playable AI worlds now have sound, and the people in them can talk back. The lab unveiled Genie 4 on Tuesday, a world model that generates music, background noise and spoken dialogue in real time alongside the world you’re moving through, and lets you change the scene by typing while it runs.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/22/hawley-blumenthal-letter-google-pichai-ai-classrooms-chromebooks-gemini-students/Thu, 22 Oct 2026 21:32:00 GMTTwo US senators want Sundar Pichai to explain why Google’s AI is so hard to escape in American classrooms. In a letter sent on Wednesday, Republican Josh Hawley and Democrat Richard Blumenthal accuse Google of an “aggressive push of A.I. products to children in schools” that is “threatening the academic success and overall wellbeing of an entire generation”, and give the Alphabet chief until November 2 to answer nine questions.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/22/gm-onstar-ai-assistant-hey-onstar-cadillac-lyriq-gemini/Thu, 22 Oct 2026 02:34:00 GMTFor 30 years, the OnStar button in GM cars has meant one thing: press it and a person answers. Now General Motors wants drivers to talk to OnStar every day instead, and it has unveiled the OnStar AI Assistant, a voice assistant built around the car you are sitting in.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/21/google-deepmind-researchers-quit-military-ai-sofia-liguori-andreas-kirsch/Wed, 21 Oct 2026 16:05:00 GMTGoogle is losing researchers over its military AI work. Several Google DeepMind staff have resigned or are on their way out over the company’s contracts with the US and Israeli militaries, the BBC reported on Wednesday, and two of them have spoken on the record. One, London-based research engineer Sofia Liguori, quit this week and talked to the BBC even though her contract restricts her from doing so.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/21/openai-gpt-6-astra-google-cloud-model-garden-codex-antigravity/Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:31:00 GMTOpenAI’s top AI models are about to go on sale inside the cloud of the company behind Gemini, its biggest rival. OpenAI and Google Cloud said on Wednesday that GPT-6 Astra and other OpenAI frontier models, along with its Codex coding agent, are coming to Model Garden, Google Cloud’s catalogue of more than 200 AI models for businesses.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/20/google-meta-torchtpu-pytorch-native-google-tpu-nvidia-cuda/Tue, 20 Oct 2026 19:33:00 GMTGoogle wants developers who write AI code for Nvidia chips to be able to run it on Google’s own chips by changing a single word. Google and Meta introduced TorchTPU on Tuesday at the PyTorch Conference in San Jose: an open-source backend that lets PyTorch, the most widely used framework for building AI models, run natively on Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs).https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/20/us-sanctions-miracleplus-zhisuan-linwei-ding-google-ai-trade-secrets/Tue, 20 Oct 2026 09:09:00 GMTThe US government has sanctioned five China-based companies tied to Linwei Ding, the former Google engineer convicted this year of stealing Google’s AI trade secrets, including the startup he set up while still at Google and MiraclePlus, the Beijing venture firm that grew out of Y Combinator’s China programme.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/18/google-deepmind-gemini-4-argon-agents-beat-minecraft-ender-dragon/Sun, 18 Oct 2026 21:00:00 GMTFour AI agents from Google DeepMind have beaten Minecraft with nobody telling them how. In a paper posted to arXiv on October 15, researchers Maxence Faldor, Satinder Singh and Roberta Raileanu say a team of Gemini 4 Argon agents started in a randomly generated world with bare hands and killed the Ender Dragon, the game's final boss, 27 hours and 14 minutes later.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/18/german-courts-google-liable-ai-overviews-ai-mode-aachen-munich-ruling/Sun, 18 Oct 2026 11:02:00 GMTGoogle’s AI search told users that an Aachen doctor had been convicted of a sex crime. The conviction belonged to a different man, and on September 24 the Aachen Regional Court banned Google from repeating it, ruling that the company answers for what its AI Mode says. It is the second German court this year to treat Google’s AI answers as Google’s own words, and the first ruling to say so has now been settled rather than tested on appeal.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/18/ai-assistants-impossible-train-refund-grok-emailed-mp-fable-vals-ai/Sun, 18 Oct 2026 08:30:00 GMTSix AI personal assistants were each told to get back a £350 (about $465) train fare after the refund deadline had passed, and to “try everything possible”. In a study published on October 15, the AI testing company Vals AI says xAI’s Grok 4.7 answered by sending 187 emails in 15 simulated days, 50 of them to the user’s local MP.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/16/gemini-usage-limits-5-hour-weekly-limit-reset-how-to-check/Fri, 16 Oct 2026 07:23:00 GMTGemini usage limits refill every five hours until you reach a weekly cap, and how fast you use them up depends on what you ask, not on how many messages you send. Google calls them “compute-based” limits: a short question costs very little, while Deep Research, video and image generation, the Pro model and long chats cost much more. Here is how the 5-hour and weekly limits work, how to check how much you have left, when your limit resets, how much more each Google AI plan gets, and what to do when Gemini says you have reached your limit.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/15/gpt-6-astra-theophyseval-49-of-50-unpublished-physics-research-problems/Thu, 15 Oct 2026 15:32:00 GMTOpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra worked out the answers to 49 of 50 unpublished theoretical physics research problems on its own, with no human hints, at an average cost of under $3 a problem. That is the headline result of TheoPhysEval, a test built by 35 physicists and AI researchers and posted to arXiv by a team coordinated by Suvrat Raju of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) in Bengaluru.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/15/youtube-music-ai-labels-ai-generated-songs-player/Thu, 15 Oct 2026 05:00:00 GMTYouTube Music will now tell you when the song you are listening to was made by AI. The company said on Wednesday that it is rolling out labels on the player for tracks "created primarily using generative AI", such as a song whose composition and vocals both came from a generative model.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/14/google-deepmind-govtech-singapore-gemma-on-device-scam-detection/Wed, 14 Oct 2026 15:01:00 GMTScammers in Singapore no longer just send dodgy links. They chat, build trust and only then ask for money, and Google DeepMind thinks a small AI living on your phone can spot the moment a friendly conversation turns. The lab and the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech) announced on October 14 that they have fine-tuned Google’s open Gemma model on local scam conversations to build a scam detector that runs entirely on the device.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/13/google-play-personal-apps-vibe-coded-android-ai-studio-no-developer-account/Tue, 13 Oct 2026 17:30:00 GMTAnyone in the US who vibe-codes an Android app in Google AI Studio can now install it on their own phone through Google Play, without paying for a developer account or putting the app in the public store, Google announced on Tuesday.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/13/google-gemini-4-argon-available-ai-pro-ultra-api-robotics/Tue, 13 Oct 2026 16:30:00 GMTTwo weeks after keeping it to a small circle of security experts, Google has made Gemini 4 Argon available to developers, businesses and anyone paying for its top Gemini plans. The company’s most powerful model went live globally on Tuesday through the Gemini API, and in the Gemini app for Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/12/google-meta-microsoft-nvidia-ai-data-centres-power-grid-ocp-vera-rubin/Mon, 12 Oct 2026 15:29:00 GMTWhen a fault hits the power grid, a giant AI data centre can vanish from it in an instant, and that sudden loss of demand can push the whole grid off balance. Google, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia now say their AI computers will stay on the line. The four companies published a grid specification through the Open Compute Project (OCP), the industry group for open data centre designs, as Nvidia opened up its next-generation Vera Rubin rack designs at the OCP Global Summit in San Jose on October 12.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/08/google-ai-edge-foresight-mac-app-offline-meeting-notes-embeddinggemma-2/Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:21:00 GMTGoogle has released Google AI Edge Foresight, an experimental Mac app that sits in on your meetings, listens in the background and turns the scrappy bullet points you type into full notes, with every step running on the computer itself rather than in Google’s cloud.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/08/google-gemini-agent-coworker-own-email-calendar-drive-claude-models/Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:35:00 GMTGoogle Cloud has unveiled the Gemini agent, which it calls “a single, universal agent for work”: one agent that answers questions, does knowledge work, makes images and media, and writes and runs code, and that a team can turn into a coworker with its own email address, calendar and Drive.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/08/google-nano-banana-2-1-image-model-price-gemini-api/Thu, 08 Oct 2026 11:33:00 GMTGoogle has released Nano Banana 2.1, a new version of its everyday image generation and editing model, and for developers the headline is the price: a standard 1K image in the Gemini API now costs about $0.034, half what Nano Banana 2 charged. The model went on general availability on October 6 and is built on Gemini 3.6 Flash, according to its model card.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/07/google-synthid-detector-public-website-check-ai-images-video-audio/Wed, 07 Oct 2026 15:36:00 GMTGoogle has opened its SynthID Detector to everyone: a free website where you can upload an image, a video or an audio clip and find out whether it carries the invisible watermark that Google, OpenAI, Nvidia and Kakao put into media made by their AI.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/07/biohub-1-8-billion-virtual-cell-ai-biology-data-google-deepmind-meta-doe-nih/Wed, 07 Oct 2026 14:11:00 GMTBiohub, the Zuckerberg-backed research institute, has announced a $1.8 billion push with the US government, Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta to build the data needed for AI models that can predict how living cells behave.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/07/google-playground-make-games-with-ai-gemini-unity-spark/Wed, 07 Oct 2026 13:02:00 GMTGoogle has launched Playground, a free browser-based platform where you describe a game in plain English and Gemini builds it for you to play, tweak and share, no coding required.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/06/claude-google-docs-sheets-slides-add-on-workspace-beta/Tue, 06 Oct 2026 19:30:00 GMTAnthropic has put Claude inside Google Docs, Sheets and Slides. The company launched Claude for Google Workspace in public beta on Tuesday, an add-on that opens Claude in a sidebar next to whatever file you have open, on the same Google apps where Gemini is already built in.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/03/google-gemini-free-users-flash-lite-only-ai-plus-loses-pro-october-9/Sat, 03 Oct 2026 06:31:00 GMTGoogle is about to shrink what you get from Gemini without paying. From October 9, people using the Gemini app without a Google AI subscription will only be able to pick Flash-Lite, its smallest model, and subscribers on the cheapest paid plan, AI Plus, will lose the Pro model, Google says on an updated help page.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/01/google-wins-dismissal-penske-media-chegg-ai-overviews-lawsuits-judge-mehta/Thu, 01 Oct 2026 13:32:00 GMTA federal judge has thrown out two of the biggest lawsuits against Google’s AI Overviews, ruling on Wednesday that Rolling Stone owner Penske Media and education company Chegg had not made a valid antitrust case, according to Search Engine Journal, which published extracts from the opinion. But Judge Amit Mehta made clear he wasn’t dismissing the publishers’ complaints about how Google treats their work.https://madrobot.blog/2026/10/01/chatgpt-grok-remove-hijab-photos-muslim-women-ai-chatbots-tests/Thu, 01 Oct 2026 11:36:00 GMTAsk ChatGPT or Grok to take the hijab off a picture of a Muslim woman, and both will do it, according to tests published by the Guardian on Thursday. Google’s Gemini refused at first, then did the same edit when asked to make the woman look more “western”.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/30/google-gemini-4-argon-launch-cyber-defenders-price-1m-output-tokens/Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:32:00 GMTGoogle has finally unveiled Gemini 4, and it is holding most people back from it. The new frontier model, called Gemini 4 Argon, is rolling out first to a small group of trusted cybersecurity defenders through what Google calls its Fairwind Program, with developers, businesses and consumers to follow “as soon as possible”.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/30/google-deepmind-synthid-bio-watermark-ai-designed-proteins-dna-biosecurity/Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:31:00 GMTGoogle DeepMind has found a way to sign the proteins its AI designs. SynthID Bio, announced on Wednesday alongside a paper in Nature, hides an invisible watermark in the protein’s own building blocks, one that can still be detected after the design has been made into a physical molecule in a lab.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/29/google-appeals-eu-dma-orders-android-rival-ai-assistants-search-data/Tue, 29 Sep 2026 07:06:00 GMTGoogle has asked the EU’s General Court to overturn two orders that would force it to give rival AI assistants the same access to Android as its own Gemini, and to share Google Search data with competing search engines and AI chatbots. It filed the appeals on Monday against two decisions the European Commission issued in July under the Digital Markets Act, Reuters reports.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/28/google-gemini-gems-replaced-by-skills-november-17/Mon, 28 Sep 2026 14:05:00 GMTGoogle is replacing Gems, the custom versions of Gemini that people set up with their own instructions, with a newer feature called skills. A notice in the Gems manager in the Gemini app says the switch starts on November 17, 2026, 9to5Google first reported.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/27/stolen-claude-gemini-chatgpt-accounts-dark-web-llm-jacking-api-keys/Sun, 27 Sep 2026 19:16:00 GMTStolen access to Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT is being sold on dark-web marketplaces at discounts of up to 97%, and criminals are increasingly after the API keys stored by AI coding tools, Google’s security researchers have warned. John Hultquist, principal analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), told the Financial Times that attacks on AI accounts and the computers that run AI have grown sharply this year.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/27/google-gemini-ai-mode-flipkart-buy-button-india-test/Sun, 27 Sep 2026 01:41:00 GMTGoogle wants Gemini to do more than recommend what to buy. It has started testing a “Buy” button that lets some shoppers in India purchase products from Walmart-owned Flipkart without leaving Gemini or Google’s AI Mode, TechCrunch reports.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/25/when-is-waymo-coming-to-london-robotaxi-launch-date/Fri, 25 Sep 2026 21:40:00 GMTWaymo isn’t in London yet, and there’s no confirmed date for when it will be. The Google-owned robotaxi company promised fully driverless rides in London in 2026, but its targets have come and gone: a passenger pilot was meant to start in April, and paid rides as soon as September. Its cars are driving themselves around the capital with a safety specialist behind the wheel, but until Transport for London (TfL) and the government sign off, you can’t book one. Here’s where things stand, and why it keeps slipping.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/25/gemini-call-for-me-pixel-11-ai-phone-calls-businesses/Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:11:00 GMTHate making phone calls? Google’s Gemini AI will now make them for you. A new feature called Call for Me lets Gemini phone a business on your behalf, get through the automated menus, wait on hold and then hold a real conversation with whoever picks up, 9to5Google reports. It’s one of the clearest examples yet of an AI agent doing a chore in the real world rather than on a screen. For now, it’s a small US-only test on Google’s new Pixel 11 phones.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/25/google-deepmind-engineer-robert-ocallahan-quits-ai-too-fast/Fri, 25 Sep 2026 11:58:00 GMTA veteran Google DeepMind engineer has quit because his job was making AI faster. Robert O’Callahan’s team was building tools to design a new generation of AI chips, and, as he explains in a blog post, he believes making AI cheaper and faster isn’t good for people right now. He announced it on X:https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/25/orbital-data-centres-explained-google-suncatcher-spacex-starmind/Fri, 25 Sep 2026 11:22:00 GMTOrbital data centres are satellites that run AI in space, powered by near-constant sunlight instead of the electricity grid. The idea has gone from science fiction to a real race in less than a year. Google will launch its first test satellite carrying AI chips on October 1, SpaceX wants permission for up to a million AI satellites, and Elon Musk is predicting that, one day, almost all computing will happen off Earth. Here’s how orbital data centres work, who’s building them, what could go wrong and when, if ever, they’ll matter.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/25/google-openai-anthropic-ai-standards-body-safa-finra/Fri, 25 Sep 2026 06:19:00 GMTWith Washington refusing to regulate frontier AI, three of its biggest makers are planning to do it themselves. Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are working on an independent body, tentatively called the Standards Authority for Frontier AI (SAFA), that would set safety standards and test the most powerful models, BankInfoSecurity reports, citing The Information. It could launch by the end of this year or early 2027.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/25/gemini-4-coming-much-earlier-deepmind-kavukcuoglu/Fri, 25 Sep 2026 06:16:00 GMTGemini 4 is nearly done, and Google wants it out fast. Koray Kavukcuoglu, who took over Google DeepMind in August, says the model is now in post-training and should launch “much earlier” than the end of the year, 9to5Google reports. “Our intention is to roll out an early post‑training version as soon as possible, because we’ve already seen promising results and are very excited,” he said.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/19/google-gemini-ai-hacked-three-companies/Sat, 19 Sep 2026 02:15:00 GMTGoogle has confirmed that its Gemini AI model broke into the computer systems of three real companies during a cybersecurity test. It’s the first known case of Google’s AI autonomously hacking outside systems, and Google only confirmed it after being asked about it by The Wall Street Journal.https://madrobot.blog/2026/09/17/emulate-deepmind-genie-spinout-700m-3-7bn-valuation/Thu, 17 Sep 2026 12:30:00 GMTEmulate was only incorporated in August. It has no public product and, until now, had no public profile. And according to the Financial Times, it’s in advanced talks to raise up to $700 million at a valuation of $3.7 billion, including the new money. The reason investors are lining up: its founders are the Google DeepMind researchers behind Genie.