On the eve of about 8,000 jobs being cut, employees are cashing in on headphone stipends and other perks while they still can. Ahead of Meta's latest round of mass layoffs tomorrow, some employees are deserting offices, abandoning their work, and loading up on perks they might soon lose, several people at the company tell WIRED. Two employees describe a widespread rush to use up an annual $2,000 flexible benefit, which can cover a variety of expenses including health and wellness activities. A separate triennial credit of $200 toward the purchase of audio gear has led to a scramble to purchase Apple AirPods and other headphones. Another source says Meta offices have been largely empty this week, as people prioritize polishing their résumés and gather offsite to commiserate with friends for what may be their final time as colleagues.

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Eyes in the tech world have turned toward Mountain View, California this week. The San Francisco Bay Area city is where Google's headquarters is located, making it a logical place to hold the company's annual developer conference. That's right, gang, Google I/O 2026 kicked off on Tuesday with the usual opening keynote, which is where the company reveals what's arguably the event's most relevant info for consumers. Google made a ton of Android announcements last week, so its mobile ecosystem wasn't really on the agenda. But what else could the onus possibly have been on if not AI? We heard the word Gemini more times than I could possibly care to count, and the company had many updates to share on that front. Search, Google's longtime bread and butter, was a big focus of the event. The company talked up a new Ask YouTube feature as well as changes to AI subscription pricing and Workspace features like Docs and Gmail.

Meta is rapidly reorganizing its workers' jobs around AI: 'Transfers aren't optional' As Meta races to recenter itself around artificial intelligence, the tech giant is mandating that more than 7,000 workers must move to new teams, and it's radically changing some employees' jobs. The Guardian has also learned that some of these reassigned employees will shift to two new teams: one building AI cloud infrastructure and another that's building an internal AI agent codenamed Hatch. Late last week, Meta employees received a notice that engineers had been "selected" for reassignment and would begin reporting to the cloud infrastructure and Hatch teams by the end of this week. Meta made a similar move last month when it reshuffled at least 1,000 engineers on to a new data labeling team called Applied AI, or AAI - at first giving them the option to volunteer, but later telling workers: "Transfers aren't optional." "Our work, infrastructure and our products are fundamentally changing as a result of the continued acceleration of AI," wrote Peter Hoose, vice-president of production engineering at Meta, in an internal post about the two new teams viewed by the Guardian. "The pace of what we are building is unprecedented, and these are exactly the kind of challenges that define what we do best."

Project Genie is rolling out today for all adult Google AI Ultra subscribers across the globe, following its debut in the United States this January. The service is also getting a new Street View capability that can generate interactive landscapes based on real-world locations found on Google Maps, starting with places in the US. Project Genie is Google's AI-powered system for creating explorable snow-globe environments from written prompts, with creations lasting 60 seconds at 720p and 24 fps. Users are able to create contained worlds in whatever style they'd like, complete with a character of their own description, and then move a camera around that space. The fresh Street View functionality allows users to base their AI worlds on location photos pulled from Google Maps, grounding their creations in a snapshot of reality.

Google Search is becoming even more of a showpiece for its AI ambitions. Today at Google I/O 2026, the company announced that Search has been upgraded to the Gemini 3.5 Flash model, which it says offers faster inferencing, smarter results and the ability to process different types of media. As a result, Google is also launching a new Intelligent Search Box that can dynamically get larger to fit complex queries, as well as use videos, images, files and even Chrome tabs as inputs. None of this is a surprise, though. Over the past year, we've seen Google slowly upgrade the AI mode in Search -- now, the company is just making an AI a more essential part of searching the web. That's good news for users who like the more conversational capabilities of Google's AI, but it's even worse news for the people who are trying to maintain the simple purity of Google's original search engine.

Google's Circle to Search feature can tell you if an image was AI-generated Google's Circle to Search feature can tell you if an image was AI-generated The company is expanding SynthID to Chrome and Search. As Google introduces new models and tools for generating AI content, it's also making it a little bit easier for people to answer the question was this created with AI? The company is expanding its AI detection system SynthID so features like Circle to Search and Lens will be able to identify AI-generated and AI-edited images. SynthID is Google's homegrown watermarking system that appends invisible metadata to content created or modified with its own AI tools. Last year at I/O, the company debuted a dedicated SynthID detector and later integrated the feature into the Gemini app .

Google's redesigned Gemini comes with a new interface and AI models Google's redesigned Gemini comes with a new interface and AI models The company is rolling out the redesigned chatbot on Android and iOS today. Google has announced several updates for the Gemini app at its I/O annual developer conference, including a design language called Neural Expressive that gives it a redesigned interface with new typography, more fluid animations and haptic feedback. The company has also integrated Gemini Live into the main Gemini experience. Currently, you'll have to tap the Live button in order to have spoken conversations with the AI, but the redesign will allow you to easily switch between typing and talking to the chatbot. Google is also introducing regional dialects for Gemini and designing its responses with imagery, graphics and even narrated videos, so it doesn't respond with walls of texts.

Google's Gemini Spark is an agentic AI assistant Google's Gemini Spark is an agentic AI assistant The AI agent is rolling out to testers this week. Google has announced a 24/7 personal AI agent called Gemini Spark at this year's I/O developer conference. The company says Spark transforms Gemini from a standard AI assistant to an active partner that actually perform tasks for you. Spark is powered by Gemini 3.5 and is deeply integrated with Google Workspace apps, including Gmail, Docs and Slides. You can teach it to perform various tasks, such as creating a list of critical deadlines in your Gmail and sending it to you, or writing up a summary of ongoing updates in lengthy email threads.

Google's Gemini Omni can generate'anything from any input,' starting with video Google's Gemini Omni can generate'anything from any input,' starting with video Google didn't forget AI creators in its latest round of Gemini announcements. Google didn't forget AI creators in its latest round of Gemini announcements as part of Google I/O . The company just officially revealed Gemini Omni, a new model that can create anything from any input -- starting with video, according to Google. The first model called Gemini Omni Flash is rolling out today to the Gemini app, Google Flow and YouTube Shorts. Google called Gemini Omni the next step up from Nano Banana and, presumably, its current video generator, Veo 3.1 .