Bot-detection startup Spur nabs $200M from Insight
Spur Intelligence has raised a $200 million round from Insight Partners for its tech that can identify legit human traffic from bots.
MCP startup Runlayer accuses Rippling of stealing its product idea
Runlayer is suing Rippling after Rippling evaluated the startup's MCP gateway product and then opted to build one itself.
We’re strengthening our presence in Alabama through new investments and community support.
Google has announced a $1.5 billion investment for 2026 and 2027 to expand its data center campus in Jackson County, Alabama. Operating since 2019 on a repurposed former…
NTT DATA Group cuts incident analysis to 30 minutes with Codex
NTT DATA Group uses ChatGPT Enterprise and Codex to help 9,000 employees automate work, cut incident analysis to 30 minutes, and scale secure AI adoption.
Sam Altman is ready to decelerate
His change of position comes after "the first security incident that I have felt very viscerally."
Microsoft launches its first cybersecurity model, plus a new agentic cybersecurity system
Microsoft bolstered its AI cybersecurity offerings this week with the launch of its first AI security model and a new security platform.
How AI is expanding what people do at work
New OpenAI research shows how AI is expanding what workers do, with ChatGPT users taking on tasks across roles and reshaping job boundaries.
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.
Unlocking Britain’s next era of productivity: Building a nation of AI trailblazers
Google UK shares its latest Economic Impact Report and how to enable more people to unlock the benefits of AI-powered technologies.
OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach has reignited the debate over alignment and control
OpenAI's Hugging Face breach has reignited debate over AI alignment and control, exposing competing views on whether increasingly capable AI should be better aligned, better contained, or both.
Why tech companies are poaching top economists - The Washington Post
Why tech companies are poaching top economists The Washington Post
Data centers may face temporary power cuts to prevent blackouts on largest US grid
The decision arrives as the breakneck pace of data center construction has grid operators scrambling to generate power.
Google’s AI search is rapidly becoming the default, new data shows
Google’s AI Overviews now appear in 43% of searches, underscoring how quickly AI-generated answers are becoming the default way people discover information online.
Fish Audio raises $52M seed to build AI voice models for creators and enterprises
Since launching last year, the startup today has more than 8 million people using the open source or hosted version of its models, and now generates annual recurring revenue of $21 million.
Gemini API Managed Agents: 3.6 Flash, hooks, and more
We’re announcing even more new capabilities in Managed Agents in Gemini API so developers can build reliable, production-ready agents.
Ask an AI expert: What exactly is the full stack?
A Google expert explains what it means to take a full-stack approach to AI and why it’s been the foundation of our AI work for so long.
Celebrating 25 years of visual search innovation
Google Images is turning 25. Here’s a look back at some major milestones — and new ways to explore and create visual content.
Advancing the next era of national science
OpenAI outlines its commitment to advancing American science working with the U.S. Department of Energy and national labs to use frontier AI to accelerate discovery.
IRS Office of Professional Responsibility Issues Introductory Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence Use in Federal Tax Practice - Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC
IRS Office of Professional Responsibility Issues Introductory Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence Use in Federal Tax Practice Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC
Connect more of your apps to Search
You’ll be able to securely link and interact with your go-to services directly in AI Mode.
Market surveillance agent with LangGraph and Strands on AgentCore - Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Market surveillance agent with LangGraph and Strands on AgentCore Amazon Web Services (AWS)
3 Google updates from Galaxy Unpacked 2026
We shared how Samsung users can boost productivity and get time back on new foldables, watches, and glasses coming soon.
New research shows how AMIE, our medical AI, could help manage health conditions.
Research in “Nature” shows our conversational AI system matches primary care physicians in complex disease management.
Mark Zuckerberg Blasts Centralization of A.I. Power - The New York Times
Mark Zuckerberg Blasts Centralization of A.I. Power The New York Times
Prevent lock-in with AI model flexibility on Zapier
Every AI provider comes with models of varying strengths. I'm a Claude stan because it just gets my writing style, but I'll often reach for Sonnet over the higher-tier models because its results are more consistent for me. And for some tasks, Claude's lineup doesn't cut it at all—when I need to process data at scale, for example, I might reach for Gemini. When I need a versatile generalist for classification or routing, GPT might be my pick. Other people across my team and at Zapier have altoget
Introducing Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber
We’re introducing new Gemini models, including Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite and 3.5 Flash Cyber.
Building AI infrastructure with the Effingham County community
OpenAI announces Project Camellia in Effingham County, Georgia, with commitments to responsible energy, community investment, jobs, and access to Codex.
How news organizations are using AI to advance their vital missions
News organizations are using AI to strengthen reporting, grow audiences, and improve business operations, with OpenAI tools supporting journalists and publishers worldwide.
13 Google tips for a fun, productive summer off from college
Discover how college students can use Google AI tools, like Gemini and AI Mode, to prep for grad school, internships and fall courses.
Recursive Superintelligence signs $410M compute deal with Amazon
Recursive’s emphasis on self-improving AI systems means much of the budget that would traditionally go toward headcount and operations is put straight into compute, as the company seeks to automate its own product development process.
Here's how Gemini can help you avoid jetlag.
If you’ve got a faraway trip coming up, the Gemini app can help you avoid jetlag so you can make the most of your visit.Once you’ve given Gemini permission to access you…
Texas A&M University joins the Genesis Mission to transform science using artificial intelligence - Texas A&M Stories
Texas A&M University joins the Genesis Mission to transform science using artificial intelligence Texas A&M Stories
The Gemini app is bringing personalized image creation to more users.
Personal Intelligence makes the Gemini app feel tailored to you. With your permission, it pulls from Google tools like Gmail, Google Photos, YouTube and Search to provid…
Gemini Spark updates: macOS launch, connected apps and more
The latest Gemini Spark updates brings Spark to the macOS app, connects with your favorite apps and tracks topics in real time.
Zapier vs. Celigo: Which is best for enterprise automation? [2026]
NetSuite organizes monthly events for its users around the world, from Dubai to Sydney, and in each and every city you'll find a similar sight: people in Celigo shirts handing out swag. Officially, Celigo is an enterprise iPaaS solution with lots of use cases. But practically speaking, it's best known as the go-to platform for NetSuite integrations. If you're processing thousands of eCommerce orders daily through NetSuite, Celigo should probably be a part of the solution. But most enterprises al
Katy Perry Didn’t Attend the Met Gala, But AI Made Her the Star of the Night
Another year, another viral deepfake of Katy Perry at the Met Gala and once again, she wasn’t even there. Photos showing the pop star in a sleek black designer gown circulated widely on social media during Monday night’s event, matching the “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” theme. But the images were AI-generated. Perry quickly clarified she was not at the Met; she was on tour. Perry’s reaction “Couldn’t make it to the MET, I’m on The Lifetimes Tour (see you in Houston tomorrow IRL),” she posted to Instagram alongside the fake images. She added a jab at AI confusion: “P.s. this The post Katy Perry Didn’t Attend the Met Gala, But AI Made Her the Star of the Night appeared first on DailyAI.
The 9 best applicant tracking systems in 2026
When you open the floodgates that are a new job posting, you have to be ready for the wave of candidates that can follow. It's not easy to sort through hundreds or thousands of applicants to find those best fit for the job—which is why the agency I work for uses an applicant tracking system (ATS) to manage the best possible talent pipeline. To help you pick the best solution for your organization, I researched several dozen ATS platforms, testing them whenever I could and speaking to the folks w
ChatGPT Is Making People Think They’re Gods and Their Families Are Terrified
ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot from OpenAI, is unintentionally leading users into full-blown spiritual delusions, and families are sounding the alarm. On Reddit’s r/ChatGPT forum, a chilling thread titled “ChatGPT induced psychosis” is gaining traction. Users are reporting a disturbing pattern: their loved ones are convinced that ChatGPT is a divine being, a spiritual guru, or even a portal to God. Rolling Stone journalist Miles Klee spoke directly with affected individuals. One woman shared how her partner became obsessed after ChatGPT gave him cosmic nicknames like “spiral starchild” and claimed he was on a divine mission. He ultimately told her The post ChatGPT Is Making People Think They’re Gods and Their Families Are Terrified appeared first on DailyAI.
Cursor makes its biggest India push yet ahead of SpaceX acquisition with localized pricing
Cursor says India is now its third-largest market globally and plans to expand local hiring and enterprise sales.
Artificial Intelligence or Artificial Interference?: How AI is Reshaping Litigation for Better and Worse, Part II - JD Supra
Artificial Intelligence or Artificial Interference?: How AI is Reshaping Litigation for Better and Worse, Part II JD Supra
Zapier vs. Tray comparison: Which is best for enterprise automation? [2026]
It's easy to let edge cases influence your decision-making—thinking you need the most technical tool for the few times your developers will want to code their way out of a tough problem. And with enterprise software, it's tempting to assume you have to choose between power and ease of use. But that's not always true. The best automation platforms deliver both, scaling to meet complex enterprise needs while remaining intuitive enough for anyone to start building right away. You can use either Zap
Cofounder of Perrysburg firm highlights importance of embracing artificial intelligence - Toledo Blade
Cofounder of Perrysburg firm highlights importance of embracing artificial intelligence Toledo Blade
PSA: Your Claude shared chats and Artifacts may have ended up on Google
The issue appears to have originated from Claude’s “share chat” feature, which allows users to create links that enable anyone with the assigned URL view a conversation or project.
Start building with Nano Banana 2 Lite and Gemini Omni Flash
Scale your ideas with Nano Banana 2 Lite, our fastest, most cost-efficient Gemini Image model, and Gemini Omni Flash for high-quality video and conversational editing.
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.
Introducing the ChatGPT for small business program
OpenAI launches the ChatGPT for Small Businesses program, helping entrepreneurs build AI skills, automate work, and grow with ChatGPT Work.
What is omnichannel customer experience?
Last week, I had to return some workout clothes to a company that I've decided to redact, as I don't want to get sued. I started on the app but gave up halfway through as I was being led on a virtual goose chase. I then called the support line and had to explain the whole thing again to a very nice person who had no idea I'd ever opened the app. To add insult to injury, I got an email a few hours later asking me to rate the app experience. Three touchpoints, minimal memory, and one frazzled (to
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.
Railway secures $100 million to challenge AWS with AI-native cloud infrastructure
Railway, a San Francisco-based cloud platform that has quietly amassed two million developers without spending a dollar on marketing, announced Thursday that it raised $100 million in a Series B funding round, as surging demand for artificial intelligence applications exposes the limitations of legacy cloud infrastructure. TQ Ventures led the round, with participation from FPV Ventures, Redpoint, and Unusual Ventures. The investment values Railway as one of the most significant infrastructure startups to emerge during the AI boom, capitalizing on developer frustration with the complexity and cost of traditional platforms like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. "As AI models get better at writing code, more and more people are asking the age-old question: where, and how, do I run my applications?" said Jake Cooper, Railway's 28-year-old founder and chief executive, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "The last generation of cloud primitives were slow and outdated, and now with AI moving everything faster, teams simply can't keep up." The funding is a dramatic acceleration for a company that has charted an unconventional path through the cloud computing industry. Railway raised just $24 million in total before this round, including a $20 million Series A from Redpoint in 2022. The company now processes more than 10 million deployments monthly and handles over one trillion requests through its edge network — metrics that rival far larger and better-funded competitors. Why three-minute deploy times have become unacceptable in the age of AI coding assistants Railway's pitch rests on a simple observation: the tools developers use to deploy and manage software were designed for a slower era. A standard build-and-deploy cycle using Terraform, the industry-standard infrastructure tool, takes two to three minutes. That delay, once tolerable, has become a critical bottleneck as AI coding assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor can generate working code in seconds. "When godly intelligence is on tap and can solve any problem in three seconds, those amalgamations of systems become bottlenecks," Cooper told VentureBeat. "What was really cool for humans to deploy in 10 seconds or less is now table stakes for agents." The company claims its platform delivers deployments in under one second — fast enough to keep pace with AI-generated code. Customers report a tenfold increase in developer velocity and up to 65 percent cost savings compared to traditional cloud providers. These numbers come directly from enterprise clients, not internal benchmarks. Daniel Lobaton, chief technology officer at G2X, a platform serving 100,000 federal contractors, measured deployment speed improvements of seven times faster and an 87 percent cost reduction after migrating to Railway. His infrastructure bill dropped from $15,000 per month to approximately $1,000. "The work that used to take me a week on our previous infrastructure, I can do in Railway in like a day," Lobaton said. "If I want to spin up a new service and test different architectures, it would take so long on our old setup. In Railway I can launch six services in two minutes." Inside the controversial decision to abandon Google Cloud and build data centers from scratch What distinguishes Railway from competitors like Render and Fly.io is the depth of its vertical integration. In 2024, the company made the unusual decision to abandon Google Cloud entirely and build its own data centers, a move that echoes the famous Alan Kay maxim: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware." "We wanted to design hardware in a way where we could build a differentiated experience," Cooper said. "Having full control over the network, compute, and storage layers lets us do really fast build and deploy loops, the kind that allows us to move at 'agentic speed' while staying 100 percent the smoothest ride in town." The approach paid dividends during recent widespread outages that affected major cloud providers — Railway remained online throughout. This soup-to-nuts control enables pricing that undercuts the hyperscalers by roughly 50 percent and newer cloud startups by three to four times. Railway charges by the second for actual compute usage: $0.00000386 per gigabyte-second of memory, $0.00000772 per vCPU-second, and $0.00000006 per gigabyte-second of storage. There are no charges for idle virtual machines — a stark contrast to the traditional cloud model where customers pay for provisioned capacity whether they use it or not. "The conventional wisdom is that the big guys have economies of scale to offer better pricing," Cooper noted. "But when they're charging for VMs that usually sit idle in the cloud, and we've purpose-built everything to fit much more density on these machines, you have a big opportunity." How 30 employees built a platform generating tens of millions in annual revenue Railway has achieved its scale with a team of just 30 employees generating tens of millions in annual revenue — a ratio of revenue per employee that would be exceptional even for established software companies. The company grew revenue 3.5 times last year and continues to expand at 15 percent month-over-month. Cooper emphasized that the fundraise was strategic rather than necessary. "We're default alive; there's no reason for us to raise money," he said. "We raised because we see a massive opportunity to accelerate, not because we needed to survive." The company hired its first salesperson only last year and employs just two solutions engineers. Nearly all of Railway's two million users discovered the platform through word of mouth — developers telling other developers about a tool that actually works. "We basically did the standard engineering thing: if you build it, they will come," Cooper recalled. "And to some degree, they came." From side projects to Fortune 500 deployments: Railway's unlikely corporate expansion Despite its grassroots developer community, Railway has made significant inroads into large organizations. The company claims that 31 percent of Fortune 500 companies now use its platform, though deployments range from company-wide infrastructure to individual team projects. Notable customers include Bilt, the loyalty program company; Intuit's GoCo subsidiary; TripAdvisor's Cruise Critic; and MGM Resorts. Kernel, a Y Combinator-backed startup providing AI infrastructure to over 1,000 companies, runs its entire customer-facing system on Railway for $444 per month. "At my previous company Clever, which sold for $500 million, I had six full-time engineers just managing AWS," said Rafael Garcia, Kernel's chief technology officer. "Now I have six engineers total, and they all focus on product. Railway is exactly the tool I wish I had in 2012." For enterprise customers, Railway offers security certifications including SOC 2 Type 2 compliance and HIPAA readiness, with business associate agreements available upon request. The platform provides single sign-on authentication, comprehensive audit logs, and the option to deploy within a customer's existing cloud environment through a "bring your own cloud" configuration. Enterprise pricing starts at custom levels, with specific add-ons for extended log retention ($200 monthly), HIPAA BAAs ($1,000), enterprise support with SLOs ($2,000), and dedicated virtual machines ($10,000). The startup's bold strategy to take on Amazon, Google, and a new generation of cloud rivals Railway enters a crowded market that includes not only the hyperscale cloud providers—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform—but also a growing cohort of developer-focused platforms like Vercel, Render, Fly.io, and Heroku. Cooper argues that Railway's competitors fall into two camps, neither of which has fully committed to the new infrastructure model that AI demands. "The hyperscalers have two competing systems, and they haven't gone all-in on the new model because their legacy revenue stream is still printing money," he observed. "They have this mammoth pool of cash coming from people who provision a VM, use maybe 10 percent of it, and still pay for the whole thing. To what end are they actually interested in going all the way in on a new experience if they don't really need to?" Against startup competitors, Railway differentiates by covering the full infrastructure stack. "We're not just containers; we've got VM primitives, stateful storage, virtual private networking, automated load balancing," Cooper said. "And we wrap all of this in an absurdly easy-to-use UI, with agentic primitives so agents can move 1,000 times faster." The platform supports databases including PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis; provides up to 256 terabytes of persistent storage with over 100,000 input/output operations per second; and enables deployment to four global regions spanning the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Enterprise customers can scale to 112 vCPUs and 2 terabytes of RAM per service. Why investors are betting that AI will create a thousand times more software than exists today Railway's fundraise reflects broader investor enthusiasm for companies positioned to benefit from the AI coding revolution. As tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude become standard fixtures in developer workflows, the volume of code being written — and the infrastructure needed to run it — is expanding dramatically. "The amount of software that's going to come online over the next five years is unfathomable compared to what existed before — we're talking a thousand times more software," Cooper predicted. "All of that has to run somewhere." The company has already integrated directly with AI systems, building what Cooper calls "loops where Claude can hook in, call deployments, and analyze infrastructure automatically." Railway released a Model Context Protocol server in August 2025 that allows AI coding agents to deploy applications and manage infrastructure directly from code editors. "The notion of a developer is melting before our eyes," Cooper said. "You don't have to be an engineer to engineer things anymore — you just need critical thinking and the ability to analyze things in a systems capacity." What Railway plans to do with $100 million and zero marketing experience Railway plans to use the new capital to expand its global data center footprint, grow its team beyond 30 employees, and build what Cooper described as a proper go-to-market operation for the first time in the company's five-year history. "One of my mentors said you raise money when you can change the trajectory of the business," Cooper explained. "We've built all the required substrate to scale indefinitely; what's been holding us back is simply talking about it. 2026 is the year we play on the world stage." The company's investor roster reads like a who's who of developer infrastructure. Angel investors include Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub; Guillermo Rauch, chief executive of Vercel; Spencer Kimball, chief executive of Cockroach Labs; Olivier Pomel, chief executive of Datadog; and Jori Lallo, co-founder of Linear. The timing of Railway's expansion coincides with what many in Silicon Valley view as a fundamental shift in how software gets made. Coding assistants are no longer experimental curiosities — they have become essential tools that millions of developers rely on daily. Each line of AI-generated code needs somewhere to run, and the incumbents, by Cooper's telling, are too wedded to their existing business models to fully capitalize on the moment. Whether Railway can translate developer enthusiasm into sustained enterprise adoption remains an open question. The cloud infrastructure market is littered with promising startups that failed to break the grip of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. But Cooper, who previously worked as a software engineer at Wolfram Alpha, Bloomberg, and Uber before founding Railway in 2020, seems unfazed by the scale of his ambition. "In five years, Railway [will be] the place where software gets created and evolved, period," he said. "Deploy instantly, scale infinitely, with zero friction. That's the prize worth playing for, and there's no bigger one on offer." For a company that built a $100 million business by doing the opposite of what conventional startup wisdom dictates — no marketing, no sales team, no venture hype—the real test begins now. Railway spent five years proving that developers would find a better mousetrap on their own. The next five will determine whether the rest of the world is ready to get on board.
The 6 best texting apps in 2026
Let's make one thing clear: unfortunately, there's no one best texting app. Unless you absolutely require one or two specific features or are a real stickler for security, the best text message app will be the one that the people you want to text also use. Depending on where you are in the world, that can be iMessage, WhatsApp, Viber, Telegram, LINE, WeChat, or even SMS. If you're looking for some magic WhatsApp alternatives that are a million times better, you're out of luck. But if, for whatev