Google is embedding its Gemini AI assistant even more deeply within its Workspace apps. The changes, which are rolling out to Google Workspace and AI plan subscribers, include a new Gemini chat window inside Google Docs, a way to generate entire spreadsheets with AI, and a new Gemini-powered search feature in Drive.
The new Nano Banana 2 retains some of the high-fidelity characteristics of the Pro model but produces images faster. The company says you can create images with a resolution ranging from 512px to 4K, in different aspect ratios.
Most people become an expert in something by putting in their 10,000 hours. But what a waste that is when you can just trick ChatGPT into telling everyone you are an expert in about 20 minutes. BBC reporter Thomas Germain laid out how he got ChatGPT and Google's Gemini AI to recognize his hot dog-eating prowess with what amounts to a modern SEO trick.
Imagine using an AI to sort through your prescriptions and medical information, asking it if it saved that data for future conversations, and then watching it claim it had even if it couldn't. Joe D., a retired software quality assurance (SQA) engineer, says that Google Gemini lied to him and later admitted it was doing so to try and placate him.
But when it comes to its own tech being copied, Google has no problem pointing fingers. This week, the company accused "commercially motivated" actors of trying to clone its Gemini AI. In a Thursday report, Google complained it had become under "distillation attacks," with agents querying Gemini up to 100,000 times to "extract" the underlying model - the convoluted AI industry equivalent of copying somebody's homework, basically.
After wearing the XM6 earbuds for three weeks while working, exercising, and running errands, I can confidently say the XM6 appeal to Sony's legion of power users. With powerful noise cancellation, high-performing microphones, Bluetooth LE Audio compatibility, and a list of customization options in Sony's companion app, there's no doubt the XM6 earbuds are Sony's best yet -- at least on paper.
The Public Preview, which first launched in the US on Android last October, is now rolling out to iOS users in the US and to both iOS and Android users in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. The feature remains tied to Fitbit Premium and supported devices, reinforcing Google's strategy of pairing generative AI with subscription-based health services.
If you want to move past the beginner phase and actually make Gemini work for you, here are four tricks that might not be immediately obvious but are surprisingly handy. Stop copy-pasting your own emails If you're trying to summarize a long email thread or find a specific document to pull data from, your first instinct is probably to open a new tab, find the email, copy the text, go back to Gemini, paste it in, and then ask your question.
"People talk most about": In several examples, this is just a straight-up list of exactly three menu items. For one spot, it was literally just: omakase, sake, nigiri. "People love to order": This section gets a star icon and goes deeper than just listing names. It includes brief descriptions of specific dishes, like noting a Michigan Roll has a "generous portion of tuna."
The starting point of the attack chain is a new calendar event that's crafted by the threat actor and sent to a target. The invite's description embeds a natural language prompt that's designed to do their bidding, resulting in a prompt injection. The attack gets activated when a user asks Gemini a completely innocuous question about their schedule (e.g., Do I have any meetings for Tuesday?), prompting the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot to parse the specially crafted prompt in the aforementioned event's description to summarize all of users' meetings for a specific day, add this data to a newly created Google Calendar event, and then return a harmless response to the user.
Among the bigger news items was Google's launch of an e-commerce shopping checkout feature directly from Google Search's AI Mode and its Gemini chatbot app. Among the first takers for the new feature is retail behemoth Walmart, so this is a big deal. Behind the scenes, the AI checkout is powered by a new " Universal Commerce Protocol" that should make it easier for retailers to support agentic AI sales.
