Dec. 1–5 recap: This week showed the global scramble to out‑build, out‑train, and out‑ship AI, from datacenter deals to AI-powered smart glasses.
The post Daily Tech Insider Highlights the Escalating AI Arms Race Across Cloud, Code, and Consumer Tech appeared first on TechRepublic.
Dec. 1–5 recap: This week showed the global scramble to out‑build, out‑train, and out‑ship AI, from datacenter deals to AI-powered smart glasses.
The post Daily Tech Insider Highlights the Escalating AI Arms Race Across Cloud, Code, and Consumer Tech appeared first on TechRepublic.
Back in August, Google—and Jimmy Fallon—put on a big show to reveal the Pixel 10 series. A feature called “Magic Cue” was demoed during the event, and it seemed genuinely useful. Well, I’ve been using a Pixel 10 for three months, and I’m still waiting to be amazed.
Picture this. You can turn your year’s photos into a customizable highlight reel, with CapCut edits, smarter memories on any device, and privacy controls.
The post Google Photos’ 2025 Recap Turns Your Year Into a Story appeared first on TechRepublic.
Picture this. You can turn your year’s photos into a customizable highlight reel, with CapCut edits, smarter memories on any device, and privacy controls.
The post Google Photos’ 2025 Recap Turns Your Year Into a Story appeared first on TechRepublic.
As more AI (artificial intelligence) technologies emerge, competition among them will intensify, and rankings of the best to worst may shift. Currently, the most significant AI models are Google Gemini, Microsoft CoPilot, OpenAI ChatGPT, and Apple Intelligence.
The shoe is most certainly on the other foot. On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly declared a “code red” at the company to improve ChatGPT, delaying advertising plans and other products in the process, The Information reported based on a leaked internal memo. The move follows Google’s release of its Gemini 3 model last month, which has outperformed ChatGPT on some industry benchmark tests and sparked high-profile praise on social media.
In the memo, Altman wrote, “We are at a critical time for ChatGPT.” The company will push back work on advertising integration, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant feature called Pulse. Altman encouraged temporary team transfers and established daily calls for employees responsible for enhancing the chatbot.
The directive creates an odd symmetry with events from December 2022, when Google management declared its own “code red” internal emergency after ChatGPT launched and rapidly gained in popularity. At the time, Google CEO Sundar Pichai reassigned teams across the company to develop AI prototypes and products to compete with OpenAI’s chatbot. Now, three years later, the AI industry is in a very different place.
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It looks like Google Gemini is edging closer and closer.
The post Google Hints at March 2026 Cutoff for Assistant in Android Auto appeared first on TechRepublic.
It looks like Google Gemini is edging closer and closer.
The post Google Hints at March 2026 Cutoff for Assistant in Android Auto appeared first on TechRepublic.
Google’s meme-friendly Nano Banana image-generation model is getting an upgrade. The new Nano Banana Pro is rolling out with improved reasoning and instruction following, giving users the ability to create more accurate images with legible text and make precise edits to existing images. It’s available to everyone in the Gemini app, but free users will find themselves up against the usage limits pretty quickly.
Nano Banana Pro is part of the newly launched Gemini 3 Pro—it’s actually called Gemini 3 Pro Image in the same way the original is Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, but Google is sticking with the meme-y name. You can access it by selecting Gemini 3 Pro and then turning on the “Create images” option.
Google says the new model can follow complex prompts to create more accurate images. The model is apparently so capable that it can generate an entire usable infographic in a single shot with no weird AI squiggles in place of words. Nano Banana Pro is also better at maintaining consistency in images. You can blend up to 14 images with this tool, and it can maintain the appearance of up to five people in outputs.
Google has kicked its Gemini rollout into high gear over the past year, releasing the much-improved Gemini 2.5 family and cramming various flavors of the model into Search, Gmail, and just about everything else the company makes.
Now, Google’s increasingly unavoidable AI is getting an upgrade. Gemini 3 Pro is available in a limited form today, featuring more immersive, visual outputs and fewer lies, Google says. The company also says Gemini 3 sets a new high-water mark for vibe coding, and Google is announcing a new AI-first integrated development environment (IDE) called Antigravity, which is also available today.
Google says the release of Gemini 3 is yet another step toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). The new version of Google’s flagship AI model has expanded simulated reasoning abilities and shows improved understanding of text, images, and video. So far, testers like it—Google’s latest LLM is once again atop the LMArena leaderboard with an ELO score of 1,501, besting Gemini 2.5 Pro by 50 points.
Can the software development hero conquer the “AI Slop Monster” to uncover the gleaming, fully functional robot buried beneath the coding chaos?
That was the storyline unfolding inside a darkened studio at Seattle Center last week, as Amazon’s Kiro software development system was brought to life for a promotional video.
Instead of product diagrams or keynote slides, a crew from Seattle’s Packrat creative studio used action figures on a miniature set to create a stop-motion sequence. In this tiny dramatic scene, Kiro’s ghost mascot played the role that the product aims to fill in real life — a stabilizing force that brings structure and clarity to AI-assisted software development.
No, this is not your typical Amazon Web Services product launch.
Kiro (pronounced KEE-ro) is Amazon’s effort to rethink how developers use AI. It’s an integrated development environment that attempts to tame the wild world of vibe coding, the increasingly popular technique that creates working apps and websites from natural language prompts.
But rather than simply generating code from prompts, Kiro breaks down requests into formal specifications, design documents, and task lists. This spec-driven development approach aims to solve a fundamental problem with vibe coding: AI can quickly generate prototypes, but without structure or documentation, that code becomes unmaintainable.
It’s part of Amazon’s push into AI-powered software development, expanding beyond its AWS Code Whisperer tool to compete more aggressively against rivals such as Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini Code Assist, and open-source AI coding assistants.
The market for AI-powered development tools is booming. Gartner expects AI code assistants to become ubiquitous, forecasting that 90% of enterprise software engineers will use them by 2028, up from less than 14% in early 2024. A July 2025 report from Market.us projects the AI code assistant market will grow from $5.5 billion in 2024 to $47.3 billion by 2034.
Amazon launched Kiro in preview in July, to a strong response. Positive early reviews were tempered by frustration from users unable to gain access. Capacity constraints have since been resolved, and Amazon says more than 250,000 developers used Kiro in the first three months.
The internet is “full of prototypes that were built with AI,” said Deepak Singh, Amazon’s vice president of developer agents and experiences, in an interview last week. The problem, he explained, is that if a developer returns to that code two months later, or hands it to a teammate, “they have absolutely no idea what prompts led to that. It’s gone.”
Kiro solves that problem by offering two distinct modes of working. In addition to “vibe mode,” where they can quickly prototype an idea, Kiro has a more structured “spec mode,” with formal specifications, design documents, and task lists that capture what the software is meant to do.
Now, the company is taking Kiro out of preview into general availability, rolling out new features and opening the tool more broadly to development teams and companies.
As a product of Amazon’s cloud division, Kiro is unusual in that it’s relevant well beyond the world of AWS. It works across languages, frameworks, and deployment environments. Developers can build in JavaScript, Python, Go, or other languages and run applications anywhere — on AWS, other cloud platforms, on-premises, or locally.
That flexibility and broader reach are key reasons Amazon gave Kiro a standalone brand rather than presenting it under the AWS or Amazon umbrella.
It was a “very different and intentional approach,” said Julia White, AWS chief marketing officer, in an interview at the video shoot. The idea was to defy the assumptions that come with the AWS name, including the idea that Amazon’s tools are built primarily for its own cloud.
White, a former Microsoft and SAP executive who joined AWS as chief marketing officer a year ago, has been working on the division’s fundamental brand strategy and calls Kiro a “wonderful test bed for how far we can push it.” She said those lessons are starting to surface elsewhere across AWS as the organization looks to “get back to that core of our soul.”
With developers, White said, “you have to be incredibly authentic, you need to be interesting. You need to have a point of view, and you can never be boring.” That philosophy led to the fun, quirky, and irreverent approach behind Kiro’s ghost mascot and independent branding.
The marketing strategy for Kiro caused some internal hesitation, White recalled. People inside the company wondered whether they could really push things that far.
Her answer was emphatic: “Yep, yep, we can. Let’s do it.”
Amazon’s Kiro has caused a minor stir in Seattle media circles, where the KIRO radio and TV stations, pronounced like Cairo, have used the same four letters stretching back into the last century. People at the stations were not exactly thrilled by Amazon’s naming choice.
With its core audience of developers, however, the product has struck a nerve in a positive way. During the preview period, Kiro handled more than 300 million requests and processed trillions of tokens as developers explored its capabilities, according to stats provided by the company.
Rackspace used Kiro to complete what they estimated as 52 weeks of software modernization in three weeks, according to Amazon executives. SmugMug and Flickr are among other companies espousing the virtues of Kiro’s spec-driven development approach. Early users are posting in glowing terms about the efficiencies they’re seeing from adopting the tool.
Kiro uses a tiered pricing model based on monthly credits: a free plan with 50 credits, a Pro plan at $20 per user per month with 1,000 credits, a Pro+ plan at $40 with 2,000 credits, and a Power tier at $200 with 10,000 credits, each with pay-per-use overages.
With the move to general availability, Amazon says teams can now manage Kiro centrally through AWS IAM Identity Center, and startups in most countries can apply for up to 100 free Pro+ seats for a year’s worth of Kiro credits.
New features include property-based testing — a way to verify that generated code actually does what developers specified — and a new command-line interface in the terminal, the text-based workspace many programmers use to run and test their code.
A new checkpointing system lets developers roll back changes or retrace an agent’s steps when an idea goes sideways, serving as a practical safeguard for AI-assisted coding.
Amit Patel, director of software engineering for Kiro, said the team itself is deliberately small — a classic Amazon “two-pizza team.”
And yes, they’ve been using Kiro to build Kiro, which has allowed them to move much faster. Patel pointed to a complex cross-platform notification feature that had been estimated to take four weeks of research and development. Using Kiro, one engineer prototyped it the next day and shipped the production-ready version in a day and a half.
Patel said this reflects the larger acceleration of software development in recent years. “The amount of change,” he said, “has been more than I’ve experienced in the last three decades.”
Apple's next big Siri upgrade could be powered by Google. Here are all the details on this.
The post Apple’s Next Big Siri Upgrade Could Be Powered By Google first appeared on Redmond Pie.
AI-generated photography has become more exciting with tools like Google Gemini Nano Banana AI. By using...
The post Top 10 Google Gemini Nano Banana AI Prompts for Photos appeared first on Fossbytes.
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