You'll soon be able to generate your own widgets or ask Gemini to finish a booking in Chrome on Android. The Google I/O annual developer conference is around the corner--May 19--but in what is quickly becoming a tradition, Google announced new features for Android and Gemini a week early. The news came on Tuesday via the second-ever Android Show on YouTube . This livestreamed presentation helps Google spread out the cavalcade of updates from the often jam-packed I/O keynote. The Android Show focused on new features in Android 17, the next version of Android coming later this summer, as well as several updates to the Gemini assistant experience. It continues the theme set last year by Sameer Samat, president of the Android ecosystem, of turning Android into an "intelligent operating system."

PCWorld reports that Thinking Machines, founded by ex-OpenAI executive Mira Murati, has developed new AI voice interaction models that enable real-time conversations with interruptions and visual cue recognition. The technology uses a dual-AI system with a fast interaction model and background model for complex tasks, employing a multi-stream, micro-turn approach. This advancement could transform AI voice chat from current CB radio-style turn-taking into natural human-like conversations, though the technology remains in research phase. Voice chatting with today's AI can feel as stilted as an old-school CB radio exchange, where you're forced to take turns as you talk. "Hey ChatGPT, let's talk about the movies!

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. You can get access to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini through ChatOn AI Assistant for just $30. Juggling AI subscriptions can get expensive fast. A single AI subscription can cost hundreds per year, and using multiple tools only drives the price higher. That's part of why ChatOn AI Assistant has been gaining attention recently.

Donald Trump is heading to China this week, and if his guest list is any clue, he wants to discuss technology with Xi Jinping. Donald Trump is heading to China this week, and if his guest list is any clue, he wants to discuss technology with Xi Jinping. Donald Trump is heading to China this week. If his guest list is any clue, he wants to discuss technology with Xi Jinping, though perhaps after the war in Iran. On Monday, news broke that outgoing Apple CEO, Tim Cook, as well as SpaceX and Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, would join the US president.

Digg is back again and has taken on yet another form: A website that aggregates news about artificial intelligence. Digg's job is to find that signal and bring it to you. AI is just the beginning, he said, calling it the noisiest, fastest-moving space on the internet. He promised that more verticals are coming, but he didn't say when Digg will start aggregating news about other topics. At the moment, the website follows 1,000 people directly involved in AI research, investing and media, built from X's social graph.

OpenAI has just launched Daybreak, a cybersecurity initiative that's clearly the company's competitor to Anthropic's Project Glasswing . If you'll recall, Glasswing uses Anthropic's unreleased AI model, Claude Mythos Preview, to provide its clients' cyber defense needs. It's been promising, so far: Mozilla revealed in April that Mythos helped it find and patch 271 vulnerabilities in the latest release of the Firefox browser. OpenAI says Daybreak uses its various AI models, including its specialized security agent Codex. In its announcement, the company explained that Daybreak is built around the premise that cyber defense should be built into software from the start and not just revolve around finding and fixing vulnerabilities.

Ilya Sutskever Stands by His Role in Sam Altman's OpenAI Ouster: 'I Didn't Want It to Be Destroyed' The former OpenAI chief scientist may be estranged from the company, but he still came to its defense as he testified on Monday. Elon Musk's trial against OpenAI and Microsoft entered its final stretch on Monday, with testimony from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and current OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor. Sutskever drew the spotlight, revealing an ownership stake in OpenAI's $850-billion for-profit arm that is currently worth about $7 billion. That makes him one of the largest known individual shareholders of OpenAI. Earlier in the trial, OpenAI president Greg Brockman acknowledged for the first time that he has around $30 billion worth of OpenAI shares .

Daron Acemoglu is more cautious than most about predictions of a jobs apocalypse. A few months before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2024, Daron Acemoglu published a paper that earned him few fans in Silicon Valley. Contrary to what Big Tech CEOs had been promising--an overhaul of all white-collar work--Acemoglu estimated that AI would give only a small boost to US productivity and would not obviate the need for human work. It's okay at automating certain tasks, he wrote, but some jobs will be perfectly fine. Two years later, Acemoglu's measured take has not caught on. Chatter about an AI jobs apocalypse pops up everywhere from Senator Bernie Sanders's rallies to conversations I overhear in line at the grocery store.

Plus: Meta's embrace of AI is making employees miserable. Here's what you need to know about the cruise ship hantavirus outbreak Last week, eight passengers aboard a Dutch-flagged cruise ship contracted a type of hantavirus transmitted by rats. But health experts stress that this situation is nothing like the coronavirus outbreak in 2020. The Andes virus is known to spread between people, and there are no specific antiviral treatments or vaccines. Yet transmission appears to require a specific form of contact that the cruise ship fostered. Here's what you need to know about the outbreak--and why experts believe it can be contained .

There's a deep, forbidding moat that surrounds Nvidia--and it has nothing to do with hardware. Forgive me for starting with a cliché, a piece of finance jargon that has recently slipped into the tech lexicon, but I'm afraid I must talk about "moats." Popularized decades ago by Warren Buffett to refer to a company's competitive advantage, the word found its way into Silicon Valley pitch decks when a memo purportedly leaked from Google, titled "We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI," fretted that open-source AI would pillage Big Tech's castle. A few years on, the castle walls remain safe. Apart from a brief bout of panic when DeepSeek first appeared, open-source AI models have not vastly outperformed proprietary models.