AI May Soon Help You Understand What Your Pet Is Trying to Say
Chinese tech powerhouse Baidu has filed a patent for a system that could use AI to decode animal sounds and behaviour then translate those signals into human language. For the millions of pet owners wondering what their animals are thinking, this could be the first real step toward bridging the communication gap between humans and animals. The tech Baidu’s system would collect animal vocalizations, body movements, and biological signals. It would merge that data and feed it into an AI model trained to identify emotional states. These emotional states could then be rendered in human language to boost “cross-species communication”. The post AI May Soon Help You Understand What Your Pet Is Trying to Say appeared first on DailyAI.
Defense tech, AI, and fundraising take center stage at StrictlyVC Los Angeles on June 18
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Artificial Intelligence Creates Vaccine Aimed At Preventing Future Pandemics - NDTV
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Salesforce rolls out new Slackbot AI agent as it battles Microsoft and Google in workplace AI
Salesforce on Tuesday launched an entirely rebuilt version of Slackbot, the company's workplace assistant, transforming it from a simple notification tool into what executives describe as a fully powered AI agent capable of searching enterprise data, drafting documents, and taking action on behalf of employees. The new Slackbot, now generally available to Business+ and Enterprise+ customers, is Salesforce's most aggressive move yet to position Slack at the center of the emerging "agentic AI" movement — where software agents work alongside humans to complete complex tasks. The launch comes as Salesforce attempts to convince investors that artificial intelligence will bolster its products rather than render them obsolete. "Slackbot isn't just another copilot or AI assistant," said Parker Harris, Salesforce co-founder and Slack's chief technology officer, in an exclusive interview with Salesforce. "It's the front door to the agentic enterprise, powered by Salesforce." From tricycle to Porsche: Salesforce rebuilt Slackbot from the ground up Harris was blunt about what distinguishes the new Slackbot from its predecessor: "The old Slackbot was, you know, a little tricycle, and the new Slackbot is like, you know, a Porsche." The original Slackbot, which has existed since Slack's early days, performed basic algorithmic tasks — reminding users to add colleagues to documents, suggesting channel archives, and delivering simple notifications. The new version runs on an entirely different architecture built around a large language model and sophisticated search capabilities that can access Salesforce records, Google Drive files, calendar data, and years of Slack conversations. "It's two different things," Harris explained. "The old Slackbot was algorithmic and fairly simple. The new Slackbot is brand new — it's based around an LLM and a very robust search engine, and connections to third-party search engines, third-party enterprise data." Salesforce chose to retain the Slackbot brand despite the fundamental technical overhaul. "People know what Slackbot is, and so we wanted to carry that forward," Harris said. Why Anthropic's Claude powers the new Slackbot — and which AI models could come next The new Slackbot runs on Claude, Anthropic's large language model, a choice driven partly by compliance requirements. Slack's commercial service operates under FedRAMP Moderate certification to serve U.S. federal government customers, and Harris said Anthropic was "the only provider that could give us a compliant LLM" when Slack began building the new system. But that exclusivity won't last. "We are, this year, going to support additional providers," Harris said. "We have a great relationship with Google. Gemini is incredible — performance is great, cost is great. So we're going to use Gemini for some things." He added that OpenAI remains a possibility as well. Harris echoed Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's view that large language models are becoming commoditized: "You've heard Marc talk about LLMs are commodities, that they're democratized. I call them CPUs." On the sensitive question of training data, Harris was unequivocal: Salesforce does not train any models on customer data. "Models don't have any sort of security," he explained. "If we trained it on some confidential conversation that you and I have, I don't want Carolyn to know — if I train it into the LLM, there is no way for me to say you get to see the answer, but Carolyn doesn't." Inside Salesforce's internal experiment: 80,000 employees tested Slackbot with striking results Salesforce has been testing the new Slackbot internally for months, rolling it out to all 80,000 employees. According to Ryan Gavin, Slack's chief marketing officer, the results have been striking: "It's the fastest adopted product in Salesforce history." Internal data shows that two-thirds of Salesforce employees have tried the new Slackbot, with 80% of those users continuing to use it regularly. Internal satisfaction rates reached 96% — the highest for any AI feature Slack has shipped. Employees report saving between two and 20 hours per week. The adoption happened largely organically. "I think it was about five days, and a Canvas was developed by our employees called 'The Most Stealable Slackbot Prompts,'" Gavin said. "People just started adding to it organically. I think it's up to 250-plus prompts that are in this Canvas right now." Kate Crotty, a principal UX researcher at Salesforce, found that 73% of internal adoption was driven by social sharing rather than top-down mandates. "Everybody is there to help each other learn and communicate hacks," she said. How Slackbot transforms scattered enterprise data into executive-ready insights During a product demonstration, Amy Bauer, Slack's product experience designer, showed how Slackbot can synthesize information across multiple sources. In one example, she asked Slackbot to analyze customer feedback from a pilot program, upload an image of a usage dashboard, and have Slackbot correlate the qualitative and quantitative data. "This is where Slackbot really earns its keep for me," Bauer explained. "What it's doing is not just simply reading the image — it's actually looking at the image and comparing it to the insight it just generated for me." Slackbot can then query Salesforce to find enterprise accounts with open deals that might be good candidates for early access, creating what Bauer called "a really great justification and plan to move forward." Finally, it can synthesize all that information into a Canvas — Slack's collaborative document format — and find calendar availability among stakeholders to schedule a review meeting. "Up until this point, we have been working in a one-to-one capacity with Slackbot," Bauer said. "But one of the benefits that I can do now is take this insight and have it generate this into a Canvas, a shared workspace where I can iterate on it, refine it with Slackbot, or share it out with my team." Rob Seaman, Slack's chief product officer, said the Canvas creation demonstrates where the product is heading: "This is making a tool call internally to Slack Canvas to actually write, effectively, a shared document. But it signals where we're going with Slackbot — we're eventually going to be adding in additional third-party tool calls." MrBeast's company became a Slackbot guinea pig—and employees say they're saving 90 minutes a day Among Salesforce's pilot customers is Beast Industries, the parent company of YouTube star MrBeast. Luis Madrigal, the company's chief information officer, joined the launch announcement to describe his experience. "As somebody who has rolled out enterprise technologies for over two decades now, this was practically one of the easiest," Madrigal said. "The plumbing is there. Slack as an implementation, Enterprise Tools — being able to turn on the Slackbot and the Slack AI functionality was as simple as having my team go in, review, do a quick security review." Madrigal said his security team signed off "rather quickly" — unusual for enterprise AI deployments — because Slackbot accesses only the information each individual user already has permission to view. "Given all the guardrails you guys have put into place for Slackbot to be unique and customized to only the information that each individual user has, only the conversations and the Slack rooms and Slack channels that they're part of—that made my security team sign off rather quickly." One Beast Industries employee, Sinan, the head of Beast Games marketing, reported saving "at bare minimum, 90 minutes a day." Another employee, Spencer, a creative supervisor, described it as "an assistant who's paying attention when I'm not." Other pilot customers include Slalom, reMarkable, Xero, Mercari, and Engine. Mollie Bodensteiner, SVP of Operations at Engine, called Slackbot "an absolute 'chaos tamer' for our team," estimating it saves her about 30 minutes daily "just by eliminating context switching." Slackbot vs. Microsoft Copilot vs. Google Gemini: The fight for enterprise AI dominance The launch puts Salesforce in direct competition with Microsoft's Copilot, which is integrated into Teams and the broader Microsoft 365 suite, as well as Google's Gemini integrations across Workspace. When asked what distinguishes Slackbot from these alternatives, Seaman pointed to context and convenience. "The thing that makes it most powerful for our customers and users is the proximity — it's just right there in your Slack," Seaman said. "There's a tremendous convenience affordance that's naturally built into it." The deeper advantage, executives argue, is that Slackbot already understands users' work without requiring setup or training. "Most AI tools sound the same no matter who is using them," the company's announcement stated. "They lack context, miss nuance, and force you to jump between tools to get anything done." Harris put it more directly: "If you've ever had that magic experience with AI — I think ChatGPT is a great example, it's a great experience from a consumer perspective — Slackbot is really what we're doing in the enterprise, to be this employee super agent that is loved, just like people love using Slack." Amy Bauer emphasized the frictionless nature of the experience. "Slackbot is inherently grounded in the context, in the data that you have in Slack," she said. "So as you continue working in Slack, Slackbot gets better because it's grounded in the work that you're doing there. There is no setup. There is no configuration for those end users." Salesforce's ambitious plan to make Slackbot the one 'super agent' that controls all the others Salesforce positions Slackbot as what Harris calls a "super agent" — a central hub that can eventually coordinate with other AI agents across an organization. "Every corporation is going to have an employee super agent," Harris said. "Slackbot is essentially taking the magic of what Slack does. We think that Slackbot, and we're really excited about it, is going to be that." The vision extends to third-party agents already launching in Slack. Last month, Anthropic released a preview of Claude Code for Slack, allowing developers to interact with Claude's coding capabilities directly in chat threads. OpenAI, Google, Vercel, and others have also built agents for the platform. "Most of the net-new apps that are being deployed to Slack are agents," Seaman noted during the press conference. "This is proof of the promise of humans and agents coexisting and working together in Slack to solve problems." Harris described a future where Slackbot becomes an MCP (Model Context Protocol) client, able to leverage tools from across the software ecosystem — similar to how the developer tool Cursor works. "Slack can be an MCP client, and Slackbot will be the hub of that, leveraging all these tools out in the world, some of which will be these amazing agents," he said. But Harris also cautioned against over-promising on multi-agent coordination. "I still think we're in the single agent world," he said. "FY26 is going to be the year where we started to see more coordination. But we're going to do it with customer success in mind, and not demonstrate and talk about, like, 'I've got 1,000 agents working together,' because I think that's unrealistic." Slackbot costs nothing extra, but Salesforce's data access fees could squeeze some customers Slackbot is included at no additional cost for customers on Business+ and Enterprise+ plans. "There's no additional fees customers have to do," Gavin confirmed. "If they're on one of those plans, they're going to get Slackbot." However, some enterprise customers may face other cost pressures related to Salesforce's broader data strategy. CIOs may see price increases for third-party applications that work with Salesforce data, as effects of higher charges for API access ripple through the software supply chain. Fivetran CEO George Fraser has warned that Salesforce's shift in pricing policy for API access could have tangible consequences for enterprises relying on Salesforce as a system of record. "They might not be able to use Fivetran to replicate their data to Snowflake and instead have to use Salesforce Data Cloud. Or they might find that they are not able to interact with their data via ChatGPT, and instead have to use Agentforce," Fraser said in a recent CIO report. Salesforce has framed the pricing change as standard industry practice. What Slackbot can do today, what's coming in weeks, and what's still on the roadmap The new Slackbot begins rolling out today and will reach all eligible customers by the end of February. Mobile availability will complete by March 3, Bauer confirmed during her interview with VentureBeat. Some capabilities remain works in progress. Calendar reading and availability checking are available at launch, but the ability to actually book meetings is "coming a few weeks after," according to Seaman. Image generation is not currently supported, though Bauer said it's "something that we are looking at in the future." When asked about integration with competing CRM systems like HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce representatives declined to provide specifics during the interview, though they acknowledged the question touched on key competitive differentiators. Salesforce is betting the future of work looks like a chat window—and it's not alone The Slackbot launch is Salesforce's bet that the future of enterprise work is conversational — that employees will increasingly prefer to interact with AI through natural language rather than navigating traditional software interfaces. Harris described Slack's product philosophy using principles like "don't make me think" and "be a great host." The goal, he said, is for Slackbot to surface information proactively rather than requiring users to hunt for it. "One of the revelations for me is LLMs applied to unstructured information are incredible," Harris said. "And the amount of value you have if you're a Slack user, if your corporation uses Slack — the amount of value in Slack is unbelievable. Because you're talking about work, you're sharing documents, you're making decisions, but you can't as a human go through that and really get the same value that an LLM can do." Looking ahead, Harris expects the interfaces themselves to evolve beyond pure conversation. "We're kind of saturating what we can do with purely conversational UIs," he said. "I think we'll start to see agents building an interface that best suits your intent, as opposed to trying to surface something within a conversational interface that matches your intent." Microsoft, Google, and a growing roster of AI startups are placing similar bets — that the winning enterprise AI will be the one embedded in the tools workers already use, not another application to learn. The race to become that invisible layer of workplace intelligence is now fully underway. For Salesforce, the stakes extend beyond a single product launch. After a bruising year on Wall Street and persistent questions about whether AI threatens its core business, the company is wagering that Slackbot can prove the opposite — that the tens of millions of people already chatting in Slack every day is not a vulnerability, but an unassailable advantage. Haley Gault, the Salesforce account executive in Pittsburgh who stumbled upon the new Slackbot on a snowy morning, captured the shift in a single sentence: "I honestly can't imagine working for another company not having access to these types of tools. This is just how I work now." That's precisely what Salesforce is counting on.
AirTrunk commits $30B to build 5GW of AI data centers in India
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Every sales rep I know has a slightly different relationship with ChatGPT. Some swear by using it to help with everything from research and pre-call prep to objection handling and re-engagement. Others have tried it once, gotten a comically generic cold email in return, and immediately jumped ship. Many in the second camp, however, used ChatGPT for sales in the early days—when ChatGPT would write borderline restraining-order-ready "breakup" emails for prospects who ghosted them. A lot has chang
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Nous Research's NousCoder-14B is an open-source coding model landing right in the Claude Code moment
Nous Research, the open-source artificial intelligence startup backed by crypto venture firm Paradigm, released a new competitive programming model on Monday that it says matches or exceeds several larger proprietary systems — trained in just four days using 48 of Nvidia's latest B200 graphics processors. The model, called NousCoder-14B, is another entry in a crowded field of AI coding assistants, but arrives at a particularly charged moment: Claude Code, the agentic programming tool from rival Anthropic, has dominated social media discussion since New Year's Day, with developers posting breathless testimonials about its capabilities. The simultaneous developments underscore how quickly AI-assisted software development is evolving — and how fiercely companies large and small are competing to capture what many believe will become a foundational technology for how software gets written. type: embedded-entry-inline id: 74cSyrq6OUrp9SEQ5zOUSl NousCoder-14B achieves a 67.87 percent accuracy rate on LiveCodeBench v6, a standardized evaluation that tests models on competitive programming problems published between August 2024 and May 2025. That figure represents a 7.08 percentage point improvement over the base model it was trained from, Alibaba's Qwen3-14B, according to Nous Research's technical report published alongside the release. "I gave Claude Code a description of the problem, it generated what we built last year in an hour," wrote Jaana Dogan, a principal engineer at Google responsible for the Gemini API, in a viral post on X last week that captured the prevailing mood around AI coding tools. Dogan was describing a distributed agent orchestration system her team had spent a year developing — a system Claude Code approximated from a three-paragraph prompt. The juxtaposition is instructive: while Anthropic's Claude Code has captured imaginations with demonstrations of end-to-end software development, Nous Research is betting that open-source alternatives trained on verifiable problems can close the gap — and that transparency in how these models are built matters as much as raw capability. How Nous Research built an AI coding model that anyone can replicate What distinguishes the NousCoder-14B release from many competitor announcements is its radical openness. Nous Research published not just the model weights but the complete reinforcement learning environment, benchmark suite, and training harness — built on the company's Atropos framework — enabling any researcher with sufficient compute to reproduce or extend the work. "Open-sourcing the Atropos stack provides the necessary infrastructure for reproducible olympiad-level reasoning research," noted one observer on X, summarizing the significance for the academic and open-source communities. The model was trained by Joe Li, a researcher in residence at Nous Research and a former competitive programmer himself. Li's technical report reveals an unexpectedly personal dimension: he compared the model's improvement trajectory to his own journey on Codeforces, the competitive programming platform where participants earn ratings based on contest performance. Based on rough estimates mapping LiveCodeBench scores to Codeforces ratings, Li calculated that NousCoder-14B's improvemen t— from approximately the 1600-1750 rating range to 2100-2200 — mirrors a leap that took him nearly two years of sustained practice between ages 14 and 16. The model accomplished the equivalent in four days. "Watching that final training run unfold was quite a surreal experience," Li wrote in the technical report. But Li was quick to note an important caveat that speaks to broader questions about AI efficiency: he solved roughly 1,000 problems during those two years, while the model required 24,000. Humans, at least for now, remain dramatically more sample-efficient learners. Inside the reinforcement learning system that trains on 24,000 competitive programming problems NousCoder-14B's training process offers a window into the increasingly sophisticated techniques researchers use to improve AI reasoning capabilities through reinforcement learning. The approach relies on what researchers call "verifiable rewards" — a system where the model generates code solutions, those solutions are executed against test cases, and the model receives a simple binary signal: correct or incorrect. This feedback loop, while conceptually straightforward, requires significant infrastructure to execute at scale. Nous Research used Modal, a cloud computing platform, to run sandboxed code execution in parallel. Each of the 24,000 training problems contains hundreds of test cases on average, and the system must verify that generated code produces correct outputs within time and memory constraints — 15 seconds and 4 gigabytes, respectively. The training employed a technique called DAPO (Dynamic Sampling Policy Optimization), which the researchers found performed slightly better than alternatives in their experiments. A key innovation involves "dynamic sampling" — discarding training examples where the model either solves all attempts or fails all attempts, since these provide no useful gradient signal for learning. The researchers also adopted "iterative context extension," first training the model with a 32,000-token context window before expanding to 40,000 tokens. During evaluation, extending the context further to approximately 80,000 tokens produced the best results, with accuracy reaching 67.87 percent. Perhaps most significantly, the training pipeline overlaps inference and verification — as soon as the model generates a solution, it begins work on the next problem while the previous solution is being checked. This pipelining, combined with asynchronous training where multiple model instances work in parallel, maximizes hardware utilization on expensive GPU clusters. The looming data shortage that could slow AI coding model progress Buried in Li's technical report is a finding with significant implications for the future of AI development: the training dataset for NousCoder-14B encompasses "a significant portion of all readily available, verifiable competitive programming problems in a standardized dataset format." In other words, for this particular domain, the researchers are approaching the limits of high-quality training data. "The total number of competitive programming problems on the Internet is roughly the same order of magnitude," Li wrote, referring to the 24,000 problems used for training. "This suggests that within the competitive programming domain, we have approached the limits of high-quality data." This observation echoes growing concern across the AI industry about data constraints. While compute continues to scale according to well-understood economic and engineering principles, training data is "increasingly finite," as Li put it. "It appears that some of the most important research that needs to be done in the future will be in the areas of synthetic data generation and data efficient algorithms and architectures," he concluded. The challenge is particularly acute for competitive programming because the domain requires problems with known correct solutions that can be verified automatically. Unlike natural language tasks where human evaluation or proxy metrics suffice, code either works or it doesn't — making synthetic data generation considerably more difficult. Li identified one potential avenue: training models not just to solve problems but to generate solvable problems, enabling a form of self-play similar to techniques that proved successful in game-playing AI systems. "Once synthetic problem generation is solved, self-play becomes a very interesting direction," he wrote. A $65 million bet that open-source AI can compete with Big Tech Nous Research has carved out a distinctive position in the AI landscape: a company committed to open-source releases that compete with — and sometimes exceed — proprietary alternatives. The company raised $50 million in April 2025 in a round led by Paradigm, the cryptocurrency-focused venture firm founded by Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam. Total funding reached $65 million, according to some reports. The investment reflected growing interest in decentralized approaches to AI training, an area where Nous Research has developed its Psyche platform. Previous releases include Hermes 4, a family of models that we reported "outperform ChatGPT without content restrictions," and DeepHermes-3, which the company described as the first "toggle-on reasoning model" — allowing users to activate extended thinking capabilities on demand. The company has cultivated a distinctive aesthetic and community, prompting some skepticism about whether style might overshadow substance. "Ofc i'm gonna believe an anime pfp company. stop benchmarkmaxxing ffs," wrote one critic on X, referring to Nous Research's anime-style branding and the industry practice of optimizing for benchmark performance. Others raised technical questions. "Based on the benchmark, Nemotron is better," noted one commenter, referring to Nvidia's family of language models. Another asked whether NousCoder-14B is "agentic focused or just 'one shot' coding" — a distinction that matters for practical software development, where iterating on feedback typically produces better results than single attempts. What researchers say must happen next for AI coding tools to keep improving The release includes several directions for future work that hint at where AI coding research may be heading. Multi-turn reinforcement learning tops the list. Currently, the model receives only a final binary reward — pass or fail — after generating a solution. But competitive programming problems typically include public test cases that provide intermediate feedback: compilation errors, incorrect outputs, time limit violations. Training models to incorporate this feedback across multiple attempts could significantly improve performance. Controlling response length also remains a challenge. The researchers found that incorrect solutions tended to be longer than correct ones, and response lengths quickly saturated available context windows during training — a pattern that various algorithmic modifications failed to resolve. Perhaps most ambitiously, Li proposed "problem generation and self-play" — training models to both solve and create programming problems. This would address the data scarcity problem directly by enabling models to generate their own training curricula. "Humans are great at generating interesting and useful problems for other competitive programmers, but it appears that there still exists a significant gap in LLM capabilities in creative problem generation," Li wrote. The model is available now on Hugging Face under an Apache 2.0 license. For researchers and developers who want to build on the work, Nous Research has published the complete Atropos training stack alongside it. What took Li two years of adolescent dedication to achieve—climbing from a 1600-level novice to a 2100-rated competitor on Codeforces—an AI replicated in 96 hours. He needed 1,000 problems. The model needed 24,000. But soon enough, these systems may learn to write their own problems, teach themselves, and leave human benchmarks behind entirely. The question is no longer whether machines can learn to code. It's whether they'll soon be better teachers than we ever were.
Google just redesigned the search box for the first time in 25 years — here’s why it matters more than you think.
For a quarter century, the Google search box has been one of the most recognizable interfaces in computing: a thin white rectangle, a blinking cursor, a few typed words, and a list of blue links. On Tuesday, Google will formally retire that paradigm. At its annual I/O developer conference, Google announced a sweeping redesign of the search box itself — the literal text field where billions of queries begin every day — transforming it from a simple keyword input into a dynamic, AI-driven conversation starter that can accept text, images, PDFs, videos, and even open Chrome tabs as inputs. The company is also merging its AI Overviews and AI Mode features into a single, seamless search flow, eliminating the friction that previously forced users to choose between a traditional results page and an AI-forward experience. Liz Reid, Google's vice president and head of Search, called it "the biggest upgrade to our iconic search box since its debut over 25 years ago" during a press briefing on Monday. The announcement arrived alongside a blizzard of other news — new Gemini models, a personal AI agent called Spark, an intelligent shopping cart, a reimagined developer platform — but the search box redesign may prove to be the most consequential. It is the clearest signal yet that Google views the future of its flagship product not as a place where users type fragmented keywords, but as an interface where they hold open-ended, multimodal conversations with an AI system backed by the entire web. The new search box expands, accepts files, and coaches you on what to ask The changes show a fundamental shift in how Google expects people to interact with the product that generates the vast majority of Alphabet's revenue. The box itself now dynamically expands to accommodate longer, more conversational queries. Where the old interface subtly encouraged brevity — a narrow field suited to two- or three-word keyword strings — the new design invites users to fully articulate complex questions in granular detail. It also now supports multimodal inputs directly. Users can upload images, PDFs, files, and videos, or drag in content from Chrome tabs, right from the main search interface. Previously, some of these capabilities existed in AI Mode, but reaching them required extra steps. Now they sit at the primary entry point. Google is also deploying what it describes as an AI-powered query suggestion system that "goes beyond autocomplete." Rather than simply predicting the next word a user might type based on popular searches, the system helps users formulate complex, nuanced queries — essentially coaching them toward the kind of detailed questions that AI Mode handles best. The new search box is starting to roll out immediately in all countries and languages where AI Mode is available. Google is merging AI overviews and AI mode into one seamless experience Perhaps more significant than the box itself is the architectural change happening behind it. Google is unifying AI Overviews — the AI-generated summary panels that appear atop traditional search results — with AI Mode, the more immersive conversational search experience the company launched at I/O one year ago. Starting Tuesday, this merged experience will be live across mobile and desktop worldwide. A user can type a question, receive an AI Overview alongside traditional results, and then continue directly into a back-and-forth AI Mode conversation to ask follow-up questions — all without navigating to a separate interface. Reid explained the logic during the press briefing: the new AI search box is "an upgrade of our traditional search box, and so the results take you directly to main search rather than AI mode." She noted that while some power users actively sought out AI Mode, "for most users, they don't actually want to have to think about, do they want more of a traditional page or an AI-forward search experience." The goal, she said, was to ensure that "for most users, they don't have to think about where to go, they can just go to the search box they're familiar with, and it feels like they get the best experience afterwards." One billion users and doubling queries reveal how fast search behavior is shifting Google's decision to redesign the foundational interface of its most important product did not happen in a vacuum. The company shared a set of usage statistics during the briefing that reveal just how rapidly user behavior is already changing. AI Mode, which launched in the United States at I/O 2025, has surpassed one billion monthly users in its first year. AI Mode queries have been doubling every quarter since launch. AI Overviews, the lighter-weight AI summaries, now reach more than 2.5 billion monthly users. And overall search query volume hit an all-time high last quarter — a data point the company had previously disclosed on its earnings call. Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, framed these figures as evidence that AI features are additive, not cannibalistic, to search usage. "When people use our AI-powered features in search, they use search more," he said. He added that he loves "how search has become less about individual queries and feels more like an ongoing conversation, giving users deeper insights and connecting you with the vastness of the web." Reid reinforced the point: "It's not just that people are searching more, it's that they're searching differently. They're fully expressing their questions in granular detail, asking those follow-up questions and searching across modalities." Gemini 3.5 Flash gives Google's AI search the speed it needs to work at scale Under the hood, the new search experience runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash, Google's newest AI model, which the company also introduced at I/O. Google upgraded AI Mode's underlying model to 3.5 Flash to deliver what Reid described as "an even more powerful AI search experience." Gemini 3.5 Flash is the workhorse of this year's announcements. Google claims it outperforms its previous frontier model, Gemini 3.1 Pro, on nearly all benchmarks while running four times faster in output tokens per second than comparable frontier models. Pichai described it as being "in a league of its own in the top right quadrant" of the Artificial Analysis index, which plots intelligence against speed — meaning it delivers near-frontier quality at dramatically lower latency. That speed matters enormously for search. A conversational AI search experience that feels sluggish would be dead on arrival for a product that serves billions of queries daily. By coupling the redesigned interface with a model optimized for both quality and throughput, Google is attempting to make AI-powered search feel as instantaneous as the old keyword experience — while being dramatically more capable. Search can now build interactive visuals and custom mini apps on the fly The redesigned search box is also the gateway to a set of new capabilities that push search far beyond text-based answers. Google announced what it calls "generative UI" — the ability for search to dynamically build custom widgets, interactive visualizations, and even mini applications in real time, tailored to a user's specific question. Reid offered a concrete example during the briefing: a user could ask "How do black holes affect space time?" and receive an interactive visual in an AI Overview that brings the concept to life. Follow-up questions would trigger the system to dynamically generate entirely new visuals in real time. This is possible, she explained, because of "a novel real-time code generation system we built in partnership with the Google DeepMind team" that runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash. Generative UI capabilities will roll out to everyone this summer, free of charge. But Google is going further still. For ongoing tasks — planning a wedding, organizing a move, tracking a fitness routine — users will be able to build what the company describes as customizable, stateful experiences within search, powered by its Antigravity development platform. These require no coding expertise. Users simply describe what they want in natural language, and search builds it. Those experiences will be available in coming months, starting with Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the United States. AI agents that monitor the web around the clock are coming to search results The redesign also opens the door to what Google calls "information agents" — AI agents that users can configure directly within search to monitor the web 24/7 for specific conditions and deliver synthesized updates when those conditions are met. A user could, for example, set up an agent to track market movements in a particular sector with specific parameters. The agent would create a monitoring plan, tap into real-time finance data, and proactively notify the user when conditions are met — complete with links and context for further research. Other use cases include apartment hunting, tracking sneaker drops, or monitoring any topic a user cares about. Information agents will launch first for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers this summer. These agents sit within a much larger strategic pivot that Google articulated throughout the briefing: the company is going all-in on AI systems that don't just answer questions but proactively take actions on users' behalf. Beyond search, Google introduced Gemini Spark, a 24/7 personal AI agent that runs on dedicated virtual machines in Google Cloud. It unveiled the Universal Cart, an intelligent cross-merchant shopping cart. It announced the Agent Payments Protocol for agents to make secure purchases. And it expanded its Antigravity developer platform into a full ecosystem for building autonomous AI agents. Publishers, advertisers, and SEO professionals face a new reality The redesign raises profound questions for the sprawling ecosystem — publishers, advertisers, SEO professionals — that has been built around the old model of keyword search and blue links. If users increasingly express their needs as full, conversational sentences rather than fragmented keywords, the entire discipline of search engine optimization will need to evolve. Keyword-density strategies become less relevant when the AI is parsing natural language intent rather than matching strings. Content that answers deep, nuanced questions in authoritative ways becomes more valuable; content engineered to rank for two-word keyword fragments becomes less so. For publishers, the stakes are existential. AI Overviews already synthesize information from across the web and present it directly in search results, reducing the need for users to click through to source material. The new seamless AI Mode integration deepens that dynamic: users can now get an AI-generated answer and ask multiple follow-up questions without ever leaving the search page. Google has consistently maintained that its AI features drive more traffic to publishers, but the redesign puts that claim under renewed scrutiny as the search results page becomes more self-contained. For advertisers — who fund the vast majority of Google's revenue — the shift from keywords to conversations changes the calculus of ad targeting. Conversational queries contain richer intent signals, which could make ad targeting more precise and valuable. But they also create new ambiguities: when a user is in the middle of a multi-turn conversation with AI Mode, where does an ad naturally fit? Google did not detail changes to its advertising model during the briefing, but the structural shift in the interface will inevitably reshape how ads are surfaced and measured. The search box was always more than a product — it was a habit for billions of people There is a reason Google chose to redesign the search box rather than simply adding new features behind it. The search box is not just a product element at this point; it is a cultural artifact — one of the few pieces of digital infrastructure used by essentially the entire internet-connected world. Changing it sends an unmistakable message about where the company believes computing is headed. For 25 years, the search box trained billions of people to think in keywords — to compress their curiosity into the shortest possible string of words. The new box invites them to do the opposite: to think out loud, to upload what they're looking at, to ask follow-up questions, to let an AI system handle the compression. Pichai tied the company's broader ambitions to a striking statistic: Google's surfaces now process over 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month, up seven-fold from a year ago. The company expects capital expenditures of approximately $180 to $190 billion in 2026 — roughly six times the $31 billion it spent four years ago — largely to support the infrastructure required for this AI transformation. When asked about the future of traditional search, he was direct. "Search is the most used AI product in the world," he said. The blinking cursor in Google's search box still invites you to type. But after 25 years of teaching the world to speak in keywords, Google is now asking it to speak in sentences — and betting roughly $190 billion that it will.
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