The app reads your email inbox and your meeting calendar, then gives you a short audio summary. It can help you spend less time scrolling, but of course, there are privacy drawbacks to consider.

Beyond mistakes or nonsense, deliberately bad information being injected into AI search summaries is leading people down potentially harmful paths. These days, rather than showing you the traditional list of links when you run a search query, Google is intent on throwing up AI Overviews instead: synthesized summaries of information scraped off the web, with some word-prediction magic added, and packaged together in a way to sound as accurate and reliable as possible. We've written before about some of the problems with these AI Overviews, which regularly contain mistakes or nonsense, and of course rip off the work of the human writers who actually know the answers to the questions you're putting into Google. There's another problem though--these AI answers can actually be dangerous. As with every other new technology through history, scams are now making their way into AI Overviews as well, apparently injecting Google's AI answers with fraudulent phone numbers that you shouldn't trust.

Apple could unveil Gemini-powered Siri in Feb. The company will also have to hand some search engine data to rivals. The European Commission has started proceedings to ensure Google complies with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in certain ways. Specifically, the European Union's executive arm has told Google to grant third-party AI services the same level of access to Android that Gemini has. The aim is to ensure that third-party providers have an equal opportunity to innovate and compete in the rapidly evolving AI landscape on smart mobile devices, the Commission said in a statement .

Welcome back to In the Loop, new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? Last month, I interviewed Trump's Energy Secretary Chris Wright for TIME's Person of the Year feature: The Architects of AI . Wright, who came from the private sector, has now staked much of his legacy on AI acceleration. In our interview, he highlighted AI's role in advancing crucial scientific research and downplayed climate risks.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Google Search's AI Mode starts showing advertisements Users are reportedly seeing advertisements in the much-promoted AI Mode of Google Search. If you've been enjoying the lack of advertising in Google's new "AI Mode", which replaces conventional web searches with a ChatGPT-style conversational interface, then I have bad news. Users are starting to see the former search engine's omnipresent ads creep into its shiny new mode as of November 20th. Oddly, it only seems to be a small fraction of users or queries that are showing these ads at the moment, and by default it's appearing below more direct answers. That's for the results that are marked as "Sponsored" to comply with laws in the US and other countries.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Google Search's AI Mode can now help you plan your trips and save money The new features include generating itineraries, scoring deals on flights, booking tables at restaurants, and more. Ahead of the upcoming Christmas and New Year holidays, tech giant Google has rolled out new travel planning features in the AI Mode of its search engine. AI Mode will now be able to generate itineraries, find cheap routes, and help you with bookings. All you have to do is describe the type of trip you want to take in Google's AI Mode, then press a button to open up a new Canvas panel and fill it with suggestions based on Google's latest search data.

AI for search has arrived, and it can be useful, in moderation. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. AI has made its way into nearly all of the apps and websites we use regularly, whether you like it or not. From editing images to planning trips, or doing anything else on our digital devices, AI is now more likely to show up. That extends to web searches as well.

Confidence in LLMs is a useful indicator of model uncertainty and answer reliability. Existing work mainly focused on single-turn scenarios, while research on confidence in complex multi-turn interactions is limited. In this paper, we investigate whether LLM-based search agents have the ability to communicate their own confidence through verbalized confidence scores after long sequences of actions, a significantly more challenging task compared to outputting confidence in a single interaction. Experimenting on open-source agentic models, we first find that models exhibit much higher task accuracy at high confidence while having near-zero accuracy when confidence is low. Based on this observation, we propose Test-Time Scaling (TTS) methods that use confidence scores to determine answer quality, encourage the model to try again until reaching a satisfactory confidence level. Results show that our proposed methods significantly reduce token consumption while demonstrating competitive performance compared to baseline fixed budget TTS methods.

Your Apple phone has some new AI powers with iOS 26 and Visual Intelligence. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. By now you should've upgraded to iOS 26 on your iPhone, and the update is a big one. In addition to rolling out an entirely new look (called Liquid Glass), iOS 26 introduces a host of new and upgraded features, from a new battery saving mode to a mobile version of the classic Preview Mac app . Another change ushered in by iOS 26 is the introduction of an expanded Visual Intelligence tool, part of Apple Intelligence.