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John Jumper, who has worked as a researcher at Google DeepMind since 2017, announced his departure from the company on X. In 2024, Jumper and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing an open-source AI model that predicts protein structures.

“Think of it like a driving instructor with dual controls,” Google’s blog post stated. “The instructor trusts the student but stays ready to take the wheel or hit the brakes if a mistake occurs.” Google DeepMind’s plan itself lays out “internal guardrails designed to catch potential adversarial behaviour by AI agents, even as they become increasingly harder to oversee and contain,” naming methods like chain-of-thought monitoring, asynchronous alerts, real-time access control, and shutdown infrastructure.

When the Google Meet UI for Apple CarPlay launched in April, Google said Android Auto would follow soon, and now it’s here, with the rollout set to finish by June 26th. If you want to take a work call while in the car, you can see your schedule, dial colleagues, or join calls (audio only, both ways) without picking up your phone.

Noam Shazeer spent twenty years at Google before returning in 2024 after the Big G reportedly paid Character.AI — a company co-founded by Shazeer in 2021 — $2.7 billion to bring him and a team of researchers back home.

As we discussed, Epic and Google will be back in court July 16th to answer six specific questions from the court — as it decides whether to force Google to carry rival stores inside its own app store, or let it adopt “Registered App Stores” in the US instead. What do you think of the embedded arguments?

Pixel foldables get the new feature first, which is being added to Android 17 alongside native controller remapping, but only rolls out “in the coming months.” We’ve seen control options like this in other foldables before, but it’s welcome to see Google bake it into the OS.

Unlike Eric Schmidt or Gloria Caulfield, Pichai didn’t mention AI. Instead, it seems the students were protesting Google’s broader politics, and chanted “Free Palestine” over Pichai’s speech as they filed out.

“Outsider Enterprise” allegedly distributes phishing templates that have scammed people out of millions of dollars. Google says over a million fraudulent URLs are linked to the group, and that over just two weeks, it sent 2.5 million messages to Android users with links to fraudulent websites.

A Thursday email to Google Home users says there are over 3.5 million Gemini for Home early access testers, and that people should “keep a very close eye on your inbox next week” for news about “a certain speaker.” That sounds like the Google Home speaker we previewed in October, which was projected to launch in spring 2026.

The feature previously required a pair of headphones, but Google’s Gemini 3.5 Live Translate update is expanding support across more than 70 languages:

At a tech talk during WWDC 2026, Apple revealed that the company worked with Nvidia, Google, and Intel to make Private Cloud Compute work on the industry-leading AI hardware. Apple Foundational Model runs on Nvidia hardware within Google’s cloud. For more details, see our live blog.

Following capacity shortages at TSMC, Intel will “manufacture more than three million Tensor Processing Units in 2028,” half the estimated 6 million TPUs Google’s expected to make in the next two years, The Information reports. Nvidia and SK Hynix are also reportedly testing Intel’s tech for manufacturing their chips.

Per a regulatory filing, Google will pay SpaceX $920 million per month from October 2026 through June 2029, as reported by TechCrunch.

After removing some features from the AI image-maker in February, Google has shut down the app completely and directs users to Gemini instead, as reported by 9to5Google. Pixel Studio launched in 2024 alongside the Pixel 9.

I wasn’t able to enable it in Google’s Chrome Canary developer sandbox, but Windows Report got it working using a Ctrl+Shift+Space keyboard shortcut on Windows. It opens as a standalone window centered on the screen, with AI Mode at the heart of the experience.

Starting this summer, users in Ireland, Spain, France, Italy, and Estonia will be able to scan their passports to create a digital pass within the Google Wallet app. Unlike in the US, people can’t use Google’s ID passes for travel in the EU, but they can be used for online age verification as requirements sweep across the globe.

The company is lagging behind Anthropic, OpenAI, and even Microsoft when it comes to AI coding tools, but 404 Media reports it’s found a novel way to expand its training base of code: offering to pay Android developers for access to the innards of their apps.

Gozde Oznur, the product manager behind the new app, told me the idea is to use Dreambeans as a place to experiment with using AI to combine all the data Google has about you into proactive, helpful “stories.” I’ve had the app for a couple of days, and outside of a lot of shopping recommendations, some of the stuff is cool! It told me to get my devices ready for WWDC, and had some helpful info for a train trip. But I cannot get used to these AI-generated pictures of me. Just can’t do it.

Companies regularly share product specs with official accessory makers, but Google is encouraging DIYers to make their own straps, cases, and mounts for the Fitbit Air by releasing its technical specifications, 2D CAD drawings, and guidelines for the best materials to use.

It uses data from your pictures to mix and match outfits in a virtual try-on you can save and share. It’s rolling out in the US, India, and Brazil as part of the June Android drop, starting with AI Pro/Ultra subscribers and “other select users” on Android, but you’ll need at least 1,000 photos of yourself to be eligible to try it out without a subscription.

The new feature in Google Home lets you add your pets’ faces to your indoor cameras, so you get alerts that tell you which cat is walking on the counter rather than just that a cat is traversing the kitchen. To enable it, type your pet’s name and species into the Ask Home search box in the Home app; you need Google Home Premium Advanced ($20/month).