• Apple is developing smart home locks with face recognition tech.
• This move aligns with Apple's growing interest in the home devices market.
• Apple's device would compete with Google's Nest and Amazon's Ring in home security.

Apple is reportedly working on bringing its facial recognition technology to home security.

The tech giant is developing a smart lock and doorbell that would allow residents to automatically open their home doors by scanning their faces, Bloomberg reported on Sunday.

The report said that Apple's doorbell system could work with existing third-party locks or the company could partner with one lock provider to sell a complete product. The technology is still in the early stages and could be released at the end of 2025 at the earliest, the report said.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours.

The smart lock adds to Apple's growing interest in the home devices market. Last month, Bloomberg reported that Apple is working on an artificial intelligence-powered, wall-mounted tablet. The iPad-like device could be voice-operated, serve as an intercom, and control home appliances. Earlier this year, Bloomberg also reported that the company is working on building home robots.

Not all these developments may come to life. This year, Apple scrapped its car project and stopped efforts to develop a subscription model for the iPhone.

The door device could give the company an opportunity for more cross-selling with its other home products and its existing lineup of devices, like the iPhone and Apple Watch.

It could also allow the iPhone maker to compete with Google's Nest and Amazon's Ring. These devices have doorbells with a motion sensor that activates the camera and records a video of the surrounding area.

Such a product could draw the company into new debates about balancing users' privacy rights and working with law enforcement. Through emergency requests, police departments have received videos from Ring without receiving consent from the owner.

Apple and its CEO, Tim Cook, are known for prioritizing user privacy. In 2016, Cook refused to cooperate with the US government to unlock an iPhone used by a shooter in a mass shooting and attempted bombing in San Bernardino, California.

• Tech employees share their salary negotiation tips, which helped boost their pay by tens of thousands of dollars.
• Their negotiation strategies include practicing pitches, using data, and leveraging multiple offers.
• Research and transparency are key in negotiating better compensation in tech roles, they said.

Sarra Bounouh has worked at consulting giant Accenture and three Big Tech companies.

But she still deals with imposter syndrome, especially when talking compensation.

"Going into a negotiation is always, at least for me, a very uncomfortable discussion," Bounouh told Business Insider. "I just want to push through and ask for what I deserve."

She and four other tech employees from Meta, Google, and Cisco shared their salary negotiation tips before joining a company or when trying to get promoted. They have used these strategies to add tens of thousands of dollars to their original offers in recent years.

Product manager at Meta

Avoid offering the first number. If you must, back it up with research, said Bounouh, a product manager who joined Meta earlier this year.

She suggested using resources like Levels.fyi or Glassdoor and selecting your role and geography to see recent offers and compensation that makes sense for that job.

"I personally don't like having detailed conversations about level and compensation from that first call with the recruiter because I want to meet the team, I want to meet the hiring manager, I want to get excited about the role," she said.

Bounouh prefers to negotiate her level and compensation once there's an offer on the table.

She said she often gets asked about salary expectations early in the process because recruiters say they want to save time for both sides.

She politely declines to share a number by telling the recruiter: "I don't have a number for your right now. I will need to do some research before getting back to you. At this stage of the process, I'm more focused on meeting the hiring manager and team."

Rehearsal is key for conversations about promotions or raises, she said.

Bounouh said she practiced her pitch for every job after Accenture and increased all three jobs' initial salary offers: Microsoft by 32%, Snap by 19%, and Meta by 37%.

Product manager at Oracle

Internal transfers between teams or offices are also an opportunity to negotiate your compensation package.

Ketaki Vaidya, who moved from Oracle's India to California office in 2022, said she approached her negotiation with an "everything under the sun is negotiable" mindset.

First, Vaidya looked at Glassdoor and talked to people who'd made the move to gather salary data. She wanted to ensure she was getting a fair offer for the US' cost of living.

"I was being given this offer for the credibility that I had built in the organization. I felt like I had an upper hand in negotiating," she said. "I was much more confident in asking for the things that I deserve — so it ended up being a very smooth transition."

After negotiating her base salary up to $80,000, she discussed other compensation components, including the timing of her next review, sign-on bonuses, relocation costs, paid leave, and remote work. She negotiated a sign-on bonus of $15,000 and a relocation allowance of $15,000, which weren't part of the initial offer.

Now, her compensation is about $130,000 annually, including stock units and bonuses.

Product manager at Cisco

When Varun Kulkarni switched from consulting to tech to work on more artificial intelligence projects, he was careful not to come off as aggressive during his pay negotiations.

Once he had offers from Cisco and others in hand in 2022, he was transparent with recruiters and mentioned other offers, without introducing his own counter number.

He asked recruiters how high they could go and what they thought about other offers.

"You want to kind of not be too pushy" he said.

His offer from Cisco already matched the market rate and what several competitors were offering, but he managed to negotiate it by 5%, bringing his total compensation to $180,000.

Product manager at Google

During his 2022 recruitment process at Google, Yung-Yu Lin used his employer at the time, PayPal, to land better offers from both companies.

He interviewed and landed jobs at several places — but their pay did not compare with Google's offer.

Lin decided to negotiate a retention package. PayPal countered with a 10% pay bump. He then renegotiated with Google.

Google offered a 20% raise on his original compensation at PayPal, which brought his offer to the $350,000 to $400,000 range as a senior product manager, including stock-based compensation.

Software engineer at Meta

Hemant Pandey, a senior software engineer at Meta, used other offers and research in his most recent job search.

After two years at Salesforce, in 2021 he applied to Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, and two other companies. He used offers from these companies to negotiate his compensation at Meta.

"Be very transparent that you have other offers. Even if you have interviews going on, mention those, because it's also leverage," he said. It signals to the recruiter that they have to move fast and work with your parameters.

Meta's recruiters matched the base salary and restricted stock units from the highest of all offers.

Aside from being transparent, Pandey said it is important to be proactive and research how compensation works in different companies. For example, candidates should compare how stocks are refreshed, he said. A refresher is when the stock option portion of an employee's compensation is updated.

"I also negotiated my sign-on bonus and said, 'Hey, at Salesforce, I'll be leaving my $30,000 to $40,000 of annual bonus if I join you. Can you help me accommodate that?'"

Pandey was offered $520,000 in annual pay, including stock options, in that 2021 move.

"The most significant thing happened in my career when I made the move from Salesforce to Meta, which was close to almost 80 to 90% hike" in pay, Pandey said.

Do you work in tech, consulting, or finance and have a story to share about your career journey? Please reach out at [email protected].

I can tell Jess is trying to be nice about the people in her group chat, to varying degrees of success. It's not that the members are bad people. They met a year ago at a vocal workshop for aspiring musicians and artists and decided to keep in touch after it ended. The chat has become a mix of a confessional and a lovefest — people will leave long audio messages rambling about their days and texts about how much support they get from everyone. It's this "quintessential overcomplimentary, masturbatory, 'everybody loves each other so much'" space, Jess says. Plus, they're not good musicians, which is the opposite of the chat's point. She's attended various performances of other group members, and "all of them are bad, across the board," she says. But again, she's really trying to be nice. "In this group, they have so clearly found their people," she says. "I don't hate these people. I just hate being in their stupid group."

And yet she can't just quit. For each member's birthday, the group goes in on a gift together. Her birthday was first, so she felt like she had to stick around for everyone else's. She finally got through the first round of birthdays, opening the door for an exit — but it can't be an Irish exit. "I feel like I have to make a goodbye," she says. "I can't ghost. I can't ghost. It would be against the whole thing of the group." She spoke on the condition of withholding her last name for this story, for obvious reasons.

Jess isn't alone: Many people report feeling overwhelmed by group chats, saying it's difficult to keep up with messages and even comparing it to a part-time job. Many people, like Jess, also have at least one group chat they really hate. It's not just a nuisance but a place that makes their blood boil. It's like scrolling through posts from the most obnoxious people on Twitter, but you actually know them in real life. As much as you may loathe the chat, it's tough to quit — group chats may be contained in the cold, distant trappings of technology, but the contents are often warm and real.

Jess tells me our conversation has reinvigorated her commitment to leave her despised chat ahead of the new year. She's just got to think up her goodbye message first.

The group chat is a complicated invention of our modern technological existence. It can be a useful tool: a place to coordinate Fourth of July plans with extended family or stay up to speed with neighbors on the landlord's latest shenanigans. It can be a fun place: a spot for sending memes and gossip and life updates. The group chat is also often a safer space for spicy takes than social media — it's less likely to get you fired, or indicted, or canceled (though that's not impossible). Group chats can also be wildly irritating. You look away for a few hours and suddenly you've got 63 unread messages about stuff you really do not care about. And sure, you can mute it, but it's still there, haunting you.

Jeremy Birnholtz, a communication professor at Northwestern University who focuses on human-computer interaction, told me there are two features that make group chats unique (and daunting). "One is that texting is happening all the time, so you can't choose to be out of the room and not be with everybody," he said. "Two is that you're either in it or you're out of it. There's not a graceful way to ease yourself out of it as there are with social relationships."

Ignoring the group chat is less obvious than, for example, spending Thanksgiving watching TV in the living room instead of talking to everyone around the table. But eventually everyone will notice and think you're kind of a jerk for it. And if you do engage, it can be tricky to ensure you get your point across. Group texts, like all written communication, lack many of the cues of in-person communication. There's no body language, no vocal inflections or facial expressions. It's easy to misread intentions and meaning, good or bad.

"People fill in the blanks the way that they want to," Birnholtz said. If you think someone is attractive or a close friend, you fill them in in positive ways. If you think someone doesn't like you, you do the opposite.

Sharon does not have a particularly good relationship with her in-laws, a reality that has infected their group chat. She's noticed her messages in a group she's in with her mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law don't get as much attention as she thinks they should. Her mother-in-law doesn't interact with photos of Sharon's kids as much as she does with pictures of Sharon's sister-in-law's kids. In April, Sharon (which isn't her real name) made eclipse-themed pancakes — she put a dark one over a light one and then put eyes on a Mrs. Butterworth's syrup bottle to make it look as if it was watching the eclipse — and posted photos of them in the group. Her mother-in-law didn't respond, but she did pop back in when Sharon's sister-in-law posted a photo of her cat. The chilly reception led Sharon to scale back her participation, and she finally muted the chat in the fall. "I feel so much better," she says. Still, Sharon won't quit. "I wouldn't have a place if I ever wanted to communicate a message with them where I could get them all at once," she says. "So I just leave it there."

From the outside, it's hard not to wonder whether Sharon is perceiving slights where none are meant — her kids are her mother-in-law's grandchildren, after all. At the same time, Sharon is filling in the blanks this way for a reason.

"If you don't get along with somebody in person, if they're passive-aggressive or where they do weird things in person, then it's not going to work on a group chat either," Sharon says. She emphasizes that in group chats she's careful to make sure everyone gets attention for what they post and is celebrated for their achievements. She's just heart reacting away.

Group chats have gone the way of a lot of communication innovations, such as email or AOL instant messaging or, for a more modern example, Slack. It proves itself useful, and then it becomes so useful that everyone's using it all the time, and then it gets overwhelming.

"The other thing is that technologies are not designed for graceful exits for the most part," Birnholtz said. In a WhatsApp group, there's no easy way to do the Midwestern "I suppose I'll let you go" thing that subtly lets the other person know you are very much done with the conversation. You can't really slow-fade a fraternity chat the way you might your fraternity friends in real life.

I reached out to a couple of professional etiquette experts and advice givers to ask if they had thoughts about how to quit a group chat you hate without damaging relationships. Carolyn Hax, an advice columnist at The Washington Post, told me that "good protocol is always that you're in control of your own life and time," and you don't need permission for that. "Anytime you're feeling handcuffed by a group, then it's time to take a deep breath and think about that a little," she said. Group chats are about feeling connected and supported and entertained, and if you're not getting that, it's OK to "dip out," she said. Someone just quit one of Hax's group chats with college friends, explaining that she had a lot going on in her life, and no one batted an eye. "It's like, 'Hey, are you all right?' That's about it," she said. "And if people can't handle that, then that's on them."

If it's a group with essential information — updates from other parents at school, or family members — the mute button is your friend. "You let it accumulate, and then you just check in: Did I miss something important?" Hax said. "Disengage as your health demands, but keep the thread."

Hax didn't say this, but I will: It's probably fine to lie and say you're too busy to keep up with the chat and leave. It's really nobody's business to dig into what you're too busy with. Maybe it's a medical issue, or maybe you just want to peacefully scroll through Instagram reels uninterrupted by a bunch of pings.

Lisa Mirza Grotts, an etiquette consultant, said that while it's important to leave politely, in casual groups it's fine to do a "quiet" exit. "You simply leave without an announcement," she said. She also said there's no one right way to communicate in a group chat; what reads to one person as efficient might read to another as rude. "I just think you have to be mindful that it's not the perfect way to communicate," she said.

Not everyone has qualms about quitting their group chats, like Joe Cardillo, who has cleaned house lately. They've worked in venture-backed startups for about a decade and have several group chats with former colleagues and professional contacts. In one such chat, messages started to come through on what Cardillo called some pretty "inflammatory" topics. In particular, someone said that Elon Musk and Donald Trump would be "amazing" for tech, which started an argument with hundreds of messages. Cardillo spoke up, saying they didn't want to be in an "unstructured space" where people didn't show basic respect and take accountability. Ultimately they left.

"I just consider it healthy to think about what a good conversation feels like. And if this isn't it, then you're like, I'm out," Cardillo said.

Group-chat dynamics are, in a word, messy — and in many messy situations, walking away is easier said than done. One friend confessed that they'd been in a weeklyish-brunch chat for two years without any intention of ever attending said brunch. Everybody seems nice, but it just isn't their jam, and they're scared to quit. Another admitted that they kind of hated their friend-group chat, and they were pretty sure everyone else had a chat without them, but they had no idea how to broach the subject. One person told me about a friend who had abruptly left a chat after someone else in the group posted an old picture of her in which she was quite drunk. The person surmised that the friend's husband saw the photo and "went nuts."

Sometimes you just have to set a boundary, and that boundary can be deciding to not sit in a room with 12 people chattering away all day without any ability to shut them off. You can say you have to go for a reason, or you can just walk away. Who knows if they'll even miss you? Years ago, everyone quit a group chat I was in except for me and one other person. My friend renamed it "WE'RE THE BEST," and we've been talking in it, by ourselves, since. It's fun, and we're still friends with the other people.

As for Jess, she insists she's open to being friends with the people in her mediocre-musician chat on an individual, less intense level, but I have my doubts. The last time they were all interested in going to the same show, she bought a ticket — but for a different night.

"They're wonderful people," she says. "They're just not my people."

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

• Amazon drivers can earn up to an extra $25,000 for the holidays if you thank them for a delivery.
• The company has brought back its "Thank my driver" feature after first launching it in 2022.
• Amazon covered a limited amount of $5 thank-yous at no cost to customers.

Amazon brought back its promotion that'll allow you to thank your delivery driver this holiday season.

If you're pleased with your ride, you can participate by typing "Thank my Driver" into the search bar of your Amazon app or asking Alexa to "thank my driver." You'll have to thank them within 14 days of your last delivery.

It's already got a lot of traction in 2024.

The "Thank My Driver" promotion began on December 4 this year, and Amazon tipped drivers $5 for the first 2 million thank-yous from US customers.

Amazon hit the 2-million limit within six days. However, there are still ways to help your delivery person earn extra cash.

Similar to 2023, the company is offering "additional awards" for drivers who receive praise for their deliveries, according to a press release from Amazon.

Here's what Amazon is offering: "$100 each for the 1,000 most-thanked drivers each day through the rest of December; $10,000 for the seven top-thanked drivers each week until the end of December."

Meanwhile, the seven most-thanked Amazon drivers from December 4 to December 31 will receive $25,000 plus an extra $25,000 to be donated to the charity of their choice.

"Treat your customers like family, and they will do the same to you," driver Andrew Shearouse, one of the 2023 recipients of the $25,000 tip, said.

Only US-based drivers are eligible, and they must be an Amazon Flex partner, drive for a delivery service partner, or be a hub delivery associate. A delivery driver can only be thanked once per delivery. Amazon package deliveries from the Post Office and companies like UPS aren't eligible for the extra rewards.

Those looking for other ways to thank their delivery people can check TikTok, where creators are posting about the care packages they leave on their doorstep — especially during the busy holiday delivery season.

During the holiday season, Amazon drivers' shifts can be as long as 10 hours — and a serious workout. There are some Amazon drivers who earn $18 an hour compared to full-time UPS drivers who earn an average total compensation package of $145,000 per year, according to UPS.

In September, Amazon announced that it will spend $2.1 billion to give its delivery drivers a pay raise. Although the exact rate depends on location, the boost may bump drivers' pay to a national average of $22 an hour.

• Aditya Challapally teaches a Stanford Online course on generative AI for tech-adjacent professionals.
• Challapally explained how individuals can skill up technically or become an AI domain expert.
• He also said using tools like ChatGPT or Claude can help people understand AI better.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Aditya Challapally, a 30-year-old Microsoft employee who teaches a course for Stanford Online about generative AI. This story has been edited for length and clarity.

I started working in AI about a decade ago. I started as a data science intern at Uber, then did AI consulting at McKinsey, and later joined Microsoft, where I now work on Copilot.

I started guest teaching at Stanford four years ago and recently co-created a course called Mastering Generative AI for Product Innovation, which launched on Stanford Online in August 2024. It's an online, self-paced course that runs throughout the year. All of the research comes from talking to 300-plus users and 50-plus executives.

A lot of the people who take the class are tech adjacent, such as customer support representatives for a technical product, or product managers for a software or hardware product. They'll often be working on somewhat of a technical product and the course helps them understand gen AI a little bit more.

We teach three modules in this course. The first module explains what Gen AI is and where the biggest opportunities are. In the second module, we talk about what great Gen AI products look like.

The third module talks about how great Gen AI products are built and what individuals can do to set themselves up to be more influential, relevant, and useful when building Gen AI products.

These are the two main pathways you can take to do so.

Track 1: Skill up technically

When I go out and talk to Fortune 500 leaders, they say that their most burning need is for professionals who bridge both worlds — those who understand the business requirements but also understand the technical requirements.

This doesn't necessarily mean that you have to learn how to code, but you at least need to have enough technical literacy that you can translate product visions into technical requirements.

The beginner version is just getting really good at prompt engineering. This sounds like it would be quite basic, but understanding the exact limitations of prompts and all of the different tools across text, audio, and image makes you already very valuable in a business setting because you can help generate ideas even before they get to the technical team.

At an intermediate stage you also should start to understand a little bit about how gen AI systems work in systems design, like how gen AI models can be called within your data boundary.

Companies have data boundaries for which they have an agreement with their customers that their data can't go beyond. So if you're a bank, you may have an agreement with your customers that only the bank will use their information. If you send that in some sort of chat to OpenAI, that would be breaking the company data boundary. So something as simple as knowing that is already really helpful.

In the advanced stage of this track, there are two options.

Some people who don't work in big companies go deeper into understanding coding a little more. People who work in Big Tech companies usually dive deeper into system architecture. So they'll understand things like data boundaries and data flow diagrams in a lot more detail.

Track 2: Become an AI expert for your industry

The domain expertise track is where business people automatically lean toward and have an advantage. This is not necessarily knowing more about the industry, but knowing how gen AI can apply to the domain in more detail.

For example, in finance, you have to know things like what data you can use to train a specific model. You also have to know things like what types of privacy and security regulations you have to go through to get an app approved or release a gen AI-related app.

This skillset is so valuable that companies pay large amounts to consultants that have this specialized expertise. I know this guy who used to work as an operations manager at a bank and he figured out where gen AI was the most valuable. Now, companies will just call him to figure out where to launch their gen AI product.

Use the tools and learn their limitations to improve your prompts

The best thing I see people do is try to automate a lot of their lives with gen AI. They use ChatGPT or Claude for everything and that helps them understand the limitations of AI really well and how to prompt it.

When beginners start to use gen AI, they're not used to what I call the abundance of intelligence. They'll say "Can you give me a response to this text message?"

Experts who use gen AI a lot will say something like, "Can you give me 20 responses to this text message?" And then they'll go and use their taste to pick one.

Outside of work, I use it in many ways to think through a lot of plans. It's really helpful as a thought partner for me, even if for communication, for general planning, or for something even as banal as trip planning.

Instead of asking a friend for advice you should think about asking an LLM or a chatbot for advice. That's when you really start to understand how it's useful.

Illicit streaming sites that allow boxing fans to bypass the PPV fees of Tyson Fury’s latest fight pose a significant risk to viewers, experts warn

Illicit streaming sites that allow boxing fans to bypass the PPV fees of Tyson Fury’s latest fight pose a significant risk to viewers, experts warn

Climate tech is about a decade old, and people are itching for a rebrand.

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Charlotte, a green sea turtle, was hit by a boat back in 2008. This left it with an affliction colloquially referred to as the “bubble butt,” a kind of floating syndrome that makes it impossible for a turtle to dive. Most sea turtles suffering from issues like this simply die at sea, since the condition leaves them stranded at the surface where they can’t forage, sleep, and avoid predators like sharks. But fate had other plans for Charlotte.

Charlotte didn’t end up as a shark’s lunch and didn’t starve to death floating helplessly in the ocean. Instead, it got rescued shortly after the boat accident and eventually found a home at Mystic Aquarium in Stonington, Connecticut, where it received professional care. That was the first time Charlotte got lucky. The second time came when a collaboration formed: Adia, a company specializing in 3D-printing solutions; Formlabs, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of 3D printers; and New Balance Athletic, a sportswear giant based in Boston. This team chose Charlotte as a technology showcase, which basically turned the turtle into an Oscar Pistorius of the sea—just without the criminal conviction.

Weights and diet

Sea turtles are marine reptiles, which means they don’t have gills like fish—they need air to breathe. The lungs also play a key role in their buoyancy regulation system, which allows them to rest for extended periods of time at the sea floor or float at a precisely chosen depth. A sea turtle can precisely choose the depth at which it achieves neutral buoyancy by inhaling the exactly right volume of air.

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• Elon Musk has had a big year with Tesla and SpaceX soaring in value, supercharging his net worth.
• He helped Donald Trump win reelection and intends to transform the US government in 2025.
• Scroll down for seven charts showing how Musk's 2024 played out.

Elon Musk has had a year for the record books.

His businesses have taken off, with Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, and Neuralink all touching new valuation highs. Their success has boosted Musk's net worth to above $450 billion for the first time, putting him over $200 billion ahead of the world's second-richest person, Amazon's Jeff Bezos.

Musk has also become a power player in US politics after wielding his cash and clout to help win Donald Trump a second term in office. As one of the president-elect's closest advisors, he's now gearing up to overhaul the US government.

The situation seems worse at X, formerly Twitter, after Musk's $44 billion takeover and reshaping of the platform sparked an advertiser exodus.

Take a look at Musk's 2024 in charts (all data is accurate as of Friday, December 20):

1. Charging ahead

Tesla shares have shot up as much as 85% this year, driving the electric vehicle maker's market value above $1.4 trillion for the first time. They've since retreated but continue to trade near record levels.

The automaker has benefited from market buzz around artificial intelligence — which it's harnessing to develop self-driving cars and humanoid robots — plus a robust US economy and the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates.

Investors are also betting that Musk's businesses will benefit from his close ties to Trump, which could translate into less stringent regulations, government subsidies, tariff exemptions, and more.

2. Reaching for the stars

SpaceX's valuation nearly doubled from $180 billion at the end of last year to $350 billion this month, based on the price paid by the company and its backers for employee shares in its latest tender offer.

Musk's rocket, spacecraft, and satellite communications company made several technological breakthroughs this year. For example, it plucked the first-stage booster of its new Starship out of the air using a massive pair of mechanical "chopsticks" in October.

3. Shifting fortunes

Musk's net worth slumped in the spring as Tesla stock tumbled, dropping below $170 billion at its nadir.

But it rebounded by over $300 billion to touch an unprecedented $486 billion on December 17, as Tesla hit fresh highs and SpaceX notched a $350 billion valuation.

4. Rise of the robots

Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, was only founded in July 2023.

Yet it notched a post-money valuation of $24 billion in May following its Series B funding round. That rose to $50 billion in November, reports say, meaning the maker of the Grok chatbot is worth roughly as much as Monster Beverage.

5. X marks the drop

It remains tricky to gauge the health of X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter that Musk took private in 2022. One way is to use Fidelity's monthly estimates of the value of its stake in the business.

The mutual fund giant's figures imply that X's valuation has crashed since Musk's purchase. The tech billionaire laid off a large part of the company's workforce and relaxed content moderation in support of greater free speech, triggering an advertiser exodus that hammered the company's revenues.

Regardless, Musk recently posted on X that the platform has roughly 1 billion active users, although around 40% of them only log on during important world events.

6. Trump train

Musk was one of the biggest spenders in the US presidential election, deploying over $270 million to back Trump's race for president, run ads against Democrats, and promote conservative viewpoints.

His starring role in Trump's victory and emergence as one of the president-elect's closest advisors and a co-chief of the new Department of Government Efficiency suggests that his investment in the election has paid off.

7. Building brainpower

Neuralink, Musk's neurotechnology company, was valued at $8 billion this summer, up from about $2 billion three years earlier.

The developer of brain-computer interfaces wants to allow people with quadriplegia to control computers with their thoughts. Musk released footage this spring of the first patient to receive one of its brain implants.

After three years of tense reductions, the skies are clearing over Silicon Valley, and startup investors seem broadly optimistic about a resurgence in tech dealmaking.

We asked venture capitalists at 35 firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Insight Partners, IVP, and Sapphire Ventures, to tell us what's hot and what's not in tech next year, how potential regulatory changes could rouse a sleepy exit market, and where artificial intelligence goes from here.

In 2025, venture capitalists expect a loosening of antitrust regulations under the new presidential administration. This could reignite acquisition activity by strategic buyers, which would allow funds to distribute proceeds from those deals to their own investors, or limited partners, and raise new funds to invest in the next generation of startups, said Brian Garrett, managing director at Crosscut Ventures.

In recent years, startups weren't the only ones facing a cash crunch. Established funds raised the lion's share of funding dollars, while many newish and boutique funds struggled to raise. A torrent of dealmaking, combined with Trump's return to the White House and an end to the political uncertainty, could mobilize investors in these funds who had been sitting on the sidelines to whip out their checkbooks, said Ivan Nikkhoo, a managing partner at Navigate Ventures.

"Uncertainty breeds defense, optimism breeds offense," said Matt Murphy, a partner at Menlo Ventures and early Anthropic investor. "We're going into a cycle where acquirers are feeling they need to play offense and startups feel like it's time to invest in leadership. And the IPO market is open for best-in-class assets."

From IPOs to robotaxis, these are the tech trends to watch in 2025, according to venture capitalists.

Infrastructure cools off, apps soar

Jai Das, president and partner at Sapphire Ventures: "A larger number of 'application layer' companies will have a breakout year with several crossing $100 million in revenues. I predict 50 companies will cross $50 million ARR while still growing 60%+, and at least 10 will hit $100 million ARR. A lot of these companies will be prosumer companies, but there will be several business application companies as well."

Ben Lerer, managing partner at Lerer Hippeau: "When you get the cost of compute going down as quickly as it has, and the number of options in terms of foundational models growing as it has, you end up with a really interesting time for the application layer to thrive. If you're a startup, you can go with the flavor of the month — not just a ChatGPT wrapper, or a Claude wrapper, or a Gemini wrapper, or you name it — but some combination of all of them to optimize functionality, results, and the cost of those results."

Lower rates kick the IPO market into gear

Sofia Dolfe, partner at Index Ventures: "2025 is the year we will see the IPO market opening back up. There are already signs that this is on the horizon: we're seeing gradual recovery, rates have started to come down, and there are many later-stage companies with the financial profiles to go public."

Michael Yang, senior managing partner at Omers: "Two kinds of companies will go public as the IPO window opens back up next year. First, the truly great businesses that are really scaled and have forecastable growth and would've gone public earlier if the IPO market was more favorable, and second, companies that entered into structured financings with dirtier terms that need to go public for timing reasons."

Nima Wedlake, managing director at Thomvest Ventures: "The IPO market will remain closed for most tech companies, with a high bar for entry — $300 million-plus ARR, fast growth, and cash-flow breakeven or better."

As crypto prices surge, founders return to the drawing table

Nihal Mehta, general partner at Eniac: "Guidance on what the regulations could be for crypto and AI would encourage founders to build productively within those areas."

Jai Das, president and partner at Sapphire Ventures: "The new administration is crypto-friendly, bringing with it an expected acceleration of crypto-based business models (especially those using stablecoins). I predict we'll have another crypto mania in 2025."

Some venture funds go belly-up

Wesley Chan, cofounder and managing partner at FPV Ventures: "In 2025, I predict a lot of contraction for VCs, except for top funds. We're still in a downturn. Some firms shut down, a lot of firms are not doing new deals, and you will see a lot of junior-mid level employees leave."

The great funding bifurcation continues

Molly Alter, partner at Northzone: "The 'sexiest' deals will continue to raise at sky-high valuations, but for the rest of the pack, companies will need to show very specific metrics to command a strong valuation. There will be a great bifurcation into the 'haves' and the 'have-nots.'"

Don Butler, managing director at Thomvest Ventures: "Startup shutdowns will increase, particularly at the seed stage, as companies run out of cash. This will influence valuations, with investors likely focusing on startups that have shown resilience or achieved meaningful milestones."

Matt Murphy, partner at Menlo Ventures: "Valuations will rise as growth rates and market multiples recover, but many companies still might not grow back into their ZIRP valuations. People are over that and won't let it get in the way of pursuing opportunity. Valuations for GenAI companies will continue to be outliers based on any historical metrics."

Robotaxis cover new terrain

Brian Walsh, head of Wind Ventures: "2025 will be the year that we enter the age of 'robo taxis' with, first, Waymo now well along its adoption S-curve in San Francisco and expanding quickly, and, second, Tesla favorably positioned with quickly maturing best-in-class autonomy technology (no human in the loop) and an existing large fleet to scale it."

Kasper Sage, managing partner at BMW i Ventures: "Autonomous fleet deployments will gain traction in controlled, high-density environments such as for applications like campus environments and logistics for heavy industries."

Trump policy heralds return of megadeals

Aaron Jacobson, partner at NEA: "With the change of administration, I expect the return of mega M&A deals. We are going to see a 'WhatsApp' like $20 billion-plus M&A outcome for a leading AI company."

Michael Yang, senior managing partner at Omers: "Big Tech will be back at the M&A table with a new administration and regulatory regime in place. They've been quieter in recent times but should be chomping at the bit to capitalize on what is still a buyer's market."

Funding rounds become even more fluid

Sasha McKenzie and Van Jones, both deal leads at Wellington Access Ventures at Wellington Management: "The concept of letter rounds in VC is becoming more amorphous. We're seeing $30 million and $100 million seed rounds, raising questions about what seed even means anymore. The model is shifting towards evaluating how quickly founders can run and how disciplined they are with results, rather than hitting historically stated milestones (e.g., $1 million in revenue to raise a Series A). There will be more nuance in how VCs evaluate progress, focusing more on the operator and their ability to balance vision with execution, based on the capital they have."

Multi-agent systems take center stage

Aaron Jacobson, partner at NEA: "Chatbots are overhyped. Agents are under-hyped. Enterprises will move beyond the low-hanging fruit of 'GPT-wrappers' to deploy digital workers that can reason and take action to make a real business impact."

Praveen Akkiraju, managing director at Insight Partners: "If 2024 was the year of LLMs, we believe 2025 will be the year of agentic AI — where highly capable state-of-the-art reasoning LLMs are combined with orchestration frameworks like memory, tool calling, and user-in-the-loop processes to build AI agents that can address progressively complex business workflows."

Seema Amble, partner at Andreessen Horowitz: "In the short term, human workers will be the reviewer in the loop; in the future, as trust is established over time, I expect many data-derived actions will shift toward being entirely a set of narrowly defined task-driven agents."

S. Somasegar, managing director at Madrona: "The world where we each have a digital assistant that works with a collection of AI agents is probably five to ten years out. But having AI agents that can do specific tasks really, really well is happening sooner and I think we will see a ton of progress on this in 2025."

Tender offers grow for a selective group of companies

Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner at NewView Capital: "The venture secondaries market will continue to be an important source of liquidity — a trend we think is here to stay due to structural dynamics of the venture asset class."

Simon Wu, partner at Cathay Innovation: "The size of tender offers has grown from millions to billions as the desire to own top-performing names by mutual funds and VCs increases, thus allowing some of the best names to stay private longer. Tenders are likely to get bigger to a selective group of companies in tandem with a more active IPO market next year."

Industry-specific software takes over

Molly Alter, partner at Northzone: "Vertical SaaS will become more highly valued than ever, due to the increasing difficulty of differentiating a product in horizontal categories."

Cathy Gao, partner at Sapphire Ventures: "Vertical software will evolve rapidly as AI moves to the agentic phase, enabling end-to-end automation of complex, industry-specific workflows that were once beyond the reach of software. By pairing deep domain expertise with intelligent automation, vertical AI will unlock new use cases, deliver outsized ROI, and become table stakes for staying competitive."

Fintech roars back

Alexa von Tobel, managing partner at Inspired Capital: "Given the new political climate, we, of course, expect to see less regulation across the board. I think we'll see acceleration in a few core categories, including fintech."

Marlon Nichols, managing partner at MaC Venture Capital: "Fintech is an area I'm excited to invest in, particularly fintech startups leveraging AI to create transformative personal finance tools."

Sydney Thomas, general partner at Symphonic Capital: "We are watching the regulatory environment towards fintech ease which has enabled massive speculation on what asset class will win. … This also means, many startups will be required to regulate themselves, which isn't always an easy thing to do."

Robots join society

Claire Yun, investor at Piva Capital: "Generative AI will continue to accelerate and supercharge robotics; simultaneously, we will see a choke point in human labor as an aging domestic workforce and protectionist policies create a sharp supply and demand imbalance. The result will be a colorful Cambrian explosion of robots as they step in to fill this gap."

Bob Ma, partner at Wind Ventures: "Urban areas will have fleets of robots on sidewalks, while drones will manage suburban and rural deliveries. Enhanced speed, cost-efficiency, and sustainability will redefine retail and e-commerce, with regulations supporting wider adoption and innovation."

Yuri Lee, partner at IVP: "As AI advances enable robots to move from structured, repetitive tasks to more complex and dynamic real-world applications, we'll see rapid progress in robotic perception, manipulation, and decision-making capabilities."

Small language models rise in popularity

Tasneem Dohadwala, partner at Excelestar Ventures: "Small language domain-specific models are starting to show more value. Instead of using vast swaths of the internet to train large models, these smaller models can be trained on specific datasets, such as medical journals, newspapers, or email collections. As a result, they are highly tailored and more accurate in reflecting a user's particular constraints and voice.

Michael Yang, senior managing partner at Omers: "If 2024 was the year of the LLMs, 2025 will be the year of small language models (SLMs) and proprietary data sets spawning the next generation of enterprise SaaS applications. Companies have realized that data in their midst can be harnessed in new and better ways than the 'structured workflow apps' of old and by leveraging targeted SLMs, they can do work differently, more efficiently."

Founders flock to private equity

Brad Bernstein, managing partner at FTB Capital: "Despite the IPO market showing better performance in Q3'24 with proceeds already surpassing 2023 totals, structural issues like regulatory burdens and governance challenges still pose obstacles for small and mid-cap companies. Private equity markets are stepping in to fill the gap, with growth equity deals comprising a larger share of activity and providing opportunities for startups in high-growth sectors like insurtech and healthcare tech."

Jai Das, president and partner at Sapphire Partners: "With the new administration, I predict we will see an uptick in exits, and much more tech M&A activity. We'll also see PE firms buying up a lot of companies once boards and management teams realize these businesses won't be able to grow at 30% at scale and ultimately, IPO."

Open-source foundation models come for OpenAI and xAI's lunch

Aaron Jacobson, partner at NEA: "Open-source foundation models will close the gap with the leading proprietary models. On top of this we will see a significant shift away from pre-training models from scratch to fine tuning OSS models and distilling them to smaller models for faster performance."

Mo Jomaa, partner at CapitalG: "I predict that in 2025 we will continue to see open source technologies consume the infrastructure layer in software. We have seen this trend play out in several categories already, including data and analytics (which led to our investment in Databricks) and observability (which drove our investment in Grafana). Enterprises will continue to adopt open source because it helps them save money, avoid vendor lock-in, and shape the product roadmaps of the technologies that they procure."

Record deals and dollars flow to cyber and national security

Andrew Schoen, partner at NEA: "We will see a surge of investment into technologies critical to restarting the US industrial base and enhancing national security. A record number of deals and dollars will go into AI, automation, cybersecurity, and frontier technology serving manufacturing, supply chain, and defense markets."

Jake Seid, general partner at Ballistic Ventures: "Over the next 18 months, we're going to see a lot more cybersecurity exits. While this may include an uptick in M&A activity, I expect we'll see cybersecurity companies go public in 2025 and in the first half of 2026 given how large the market for cyber products has become."

Trump's tech advisors bend his ear

Samir Kumar, general partner at Touring Capital: "We should expect a lot less regulatory headwinds in 2025 for AI given David Sacks will be the AI and crypto czar for the new administration. This is likely to even result in the repeal of President Biden's executive order on AI."

Francesco Ricciuti, associate at Runa Capital: "In the US, Trump is bringing prominent people from the startup and VC world in the government, and I wouldn't be surprised if the regulatory landscape will evolve towards entrepreneurship and technology."

• Google on Friday proposed possible remedies to resolve an antitrust case over its search business.
• Last month, the DOJ suggested that the judge force Google to sell its Chrome browser.
• Judge Amit Mehta is expected to rule on the final remedies by August 2025.

Google on Friday proposed limitations to its search partnerships as a potential remedy to resolve antitrust violations in its search business.

The proposal would allow Google to continue partnering with third-party companies like Apple in revenue-sharing deals that make Google the default search engine on their devices, unlike the Justice Department's proposal. However, Google's proposal would make the deals non-exclusive, the company said in its filing.

"We don't propose these changes lightly," Google said in a blog post about the proposal. "They would come at a cost to our partners by regulating how they must go about picking the best search engine for their customers. And they would impose burdensome restrictions and oversight over contracts that have reduced prices for devices and supported innovation in rival browsers, both of which have been good for consumers."

Last month, the Justice Department and a group of states asked Judge Amit Mehta to force Google to sell its Chrome browser to resolve the case. They also asked that Google be stopped from entering default search agreements with Apple and other companies and that Google should open its search engine results to competitors.

Industry experts previously told Business Insider that selling Chrome off would open up the browser market and would likely be cheered on by search rivals and advertisers, though it remains unclear how a possible Chrome spinoff might work.

Both sides will present arguments for their proposals at a hearing scheduled for April. The judge is expected to rule on the final remedies by August.

Kent Walker, Google's president of global affairs, previously said the company intends to appeal the judge's ruling, potentially delaying a final decision by several years.

Representatives for the Justice Department's antitrust division did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Earlier this month, startup Embodied announced that it is going out of business and taking its Moxie robot with it. The $800 robots, aimed at providing emotional support for kids ages 5 to 10, would soon be bricked, the company said, because they can’t perform their core features without the cloud. Following customer backlash, Embodied is trying to create a way for the robots to live an open sourced second life.

Embodied CEO Paolo Pirjanian shared a document via a LinkedIn blog post today saying that people who used to be part of Embodied’s technical team are developing a “potential” and open source way to keep Moxies running. The document reads:

This initiative involves developing a local server application (‘OpenMoxie’) that you can run on your own computer. Once available, this community-driven option will enable you (or technically inclined individuals) to maintain Moxie’s basic functionality, develop new features, and modify her capabilities to better suit your needs—without reliance on Embodied’s cloud servers.

The notice says that after releasing OpenMoxie, Embodied plans to release “all necessary code and documentation” for developers and users.

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• Alexis Ohanian predicts AI will drive demand for more raw human experiences.
• In 10 years, live theater will be more popular than ever, the Reddit cofounder contends.
• He says no matter what jobs are replaced by AI, humans will always have an advantage in empathy.

Alexis Ohanian predicted that in a future oversaturated with artificial intelligence, people will seek out more raw, emotive human experiences.

And in 10 years, he said, live theater will be more popular than ever.

The 41-year-old, who co-founded social media platform Reddit in 2005, told the "On Purpose with Jay Shetty" podcast this week that AI will soon have an undeniable impact on nearly every aspect of society, including the entertainment sector.

Ohanian, who also founded venture capital firm Seven Seven Six in 2020, said that the industry will see a big shift when AI makes on-screen entertainment better, faster, cheaper, and more dynamic — which he said is happening.

Every screen we look at will become so programmed to show us "what we want, when we want it, how we want it," he said, that "a part of our humanity will miss, you know, thousands of years ago when we were sitting around a campfire and that great storyteller was doing the voices and the impressions.'"

"That's ingrained in our species," he said.

And that kind of raw, in-person magic will feel novel, he suggested.

"I actually bet 10 years from now live theater will be more popular than ever," Ohanian said. "Because, again, we'll look at all these screens with all these AI-polished images, and we'll actually want to sit in a room with other humans to be captivated for a couple hours in a dark room to feel the goosebumps of seeing live human performances."

The same is true for sports, he told Shetty. "We need humans doing that. We need to feel their pain and their success and their triumphs," he said. "Those are the areas that get me most hopeful."

AI can't replace genuine human empathy, Ohanian suggested.

No matter what jobs robots take over from us in the future, fields of work where empathy is a core component of the job will have an advantage, he said. And that's why one of the most important, marketable skills he's teaching his kids is empathy, he said.

• Apple is facing backlash over one of its new Apple Intelligence features in iOS 18.2.
• The feature meant to summarize iPhone notifications inaccurately summarized some news alerts.
• Nonprofit Reporters Without Borders has called for Apple to remove the generative AI feature.

Apple is facing backlash over one of its newest generative AI features.

The feature, available in the latest iOS 18.2 update, summarizes groups of notifications from an app on a user's iPhone to give them a quick rundown of what they missed at a glance.

Users, however, have pointed out at least two instances of it providing inaccurate information when attempting to summarize notifications from news organizations.

In one case, the summary falsely claimed the BBC reported that Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had killed himself. Mangione is alive and was extradited to New York on Thursday.

In another instance, the feature wrongly summarized a New York Times article to say that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been arrested. The NYT article actually reported that the International Criminal Court had issued a warrant for Netanyahu's arrest, not that he had been arrested.

The nonprofit Reporters Without Borders has called on Apple to remove the feature.

"AIs are probability machines, and facts can't be decided by a roll of the dice," said Vincent Berthier, the head of the group's technology and journalism desk, in a public statement this week. "The automated production of false information attributed to a media outlet is a blow to the outlet's credibility and a danger to the public's right to reliable information on current affairs."

Apple, the BBC, the NYT, and Reporters Without Borders did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

A spokesperson from the BBC previously said the organization has filed a complaint with Apple "to raise this concern and fix the problem."

"It is essential to us that our audiences can trust any information or journalism published in our name and that includes notifications," the spokesperson previously said.

If you want to watch the next two FIFA Women’s World Cups in the US, you’ll need a Netflix subscription.

FIFA confirmed the news today, marking an unexpected change for the sports event, which has historically played on free-to-air broadcast channels. The shift to a streaming platform inevitably makes it more costly and hurts viewer accessibility, while likely injecting FIFA with a lot of cash.

Netflix and FIFA haven’t said how much Netflix is paying for exclusive airing rights. But Netflix and other streaming services have been paying out hefty, sometimes record-setting sums to air live sporting events as the company seeks to earn more revenue from commercials and draw more viewers. Netflix, for example, paid $5 billion to swipe the World Wrestling Entertainment’s weekly RAW program from the USA cable network for 10 years, starting next month.

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On Wednesday, Elevation Lab announced TimeCapsule, a new $20 battery case purported to extend Apple AirTag battery life from one year to 10 years. The product replaces the standard CR2032 coin cell battery in the Bluetooth-based location tracker with two AA batteries to provide extended power capacity.

The TimeCapsule case requires users to remove their AirTag's original back plate and battery, then place the Apple device onto contact points inside the waterproof enclosure. The company recommends using Energizer Ultimate Lithium AA batteries, which it claims provide 14 times more power capacity than the stock coin cell battery configuration.

The CNC-machined aluminum case is aimed at users who place AirTags in vehicles, boats, or other applications where regular battery changes prove impractical. The company sells the TimeCapsule through its website and Amazon.

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• OpenAI's o1 model was hailed as a breakthrough in September.
• By November, a Chinese AI lab had released a similar model called DeepSeek.
• On Thursday, Google came out with a challenger called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking.

In September, OpenAI unveiled a radically new type of AI model called o1. In a matter of months, rivals introduced similar offerings.

On Thursday, Google released Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, which uses reasoning techniques that look a lot like o1.

Even before that, in November, a Chinese company announced DeepSeek, an AI model that breaks challenging questions down into more manageable tasks like OpenAI's o1 does.

This is the latest example of a crowded AI frontier where pricey innovations are swiftly matched, making it harder to stand out.

"It's amazing how quickly AI model improvements get commoditized," Rahul Sonwalkar, CEO of the startup Julius AI, said. "Companies spend massive amounts building these new models, and within a few months they become a commodity."

The proliferation of multiple AI models with similar capabilities could make it difficult to justify charging high prices to use these tools. The price of accessing AI models has indeed plunged in the past year or so.

That, in turn, could raise questions about whether it's worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars, or even billions, to build the next top AI model.

September is a lifetime ago in the AI industry

When OpenAI previewed its o1 model in September, the product was hailed as a breakthrough. It uses a new approach called inference-time compute to answer more challenging questions.

It does this by slicing queries into more digestible tasks and turning each of these stages into a new prompt that the model tackles. Each step requires running a new request, which is known as the inference stage in AI.

This produces a chain of thought or chain of reasoning in which each part of the problem is answered, and the model doesn't move on to the next stage until it ultimately comes up with a full response.

The model can even backtrack and check its prior steps and correct errors, or try solutions and fail before trying something else. This is akin to how humans spend longer working through complex tasks.

DeepSeek rises

In a mere two months, o1 had a rival. On November 20, a Chinese AI company released DeepSeek.

"They were probably the first ones to reproduce o1," said Charlie Snell, an AI researcher at UC Berkeley who coauthored a Google DeepMind paper this year on inference-time compute.

He's tried DeepSeek's AI model and says it performs well on complex math problems that must be solved by thinking for longer and in stages. 

He noted that in DeepSeek's DeepThink mode, the model shows users every step of its thought process. With o1, these intermediate steps are hidden from users. 

"I've asked people at OpenAI what they think of it," Snell told BI. "They say it looks like the same thing, but they don't how DeepSeek did this so fast."

OpenAI didn't respond to a request for comment. On Friday, the startup previewed an o1 successor, called o3. Francois Chollet, a respected AI expert, called the update a "significant breakthrough."

Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI cofounder, praised Google's new "Thinking" model for the same reasoning feature.

"The prominent and pleasant surprise here is that unlike o1 the reasoning traces of the model are shown," he wrote on X. "As a user I personally really like this because the reasoning itself is interesting to see and read — the models actively think through different possibilities, ideas, debate themselves, etc., it's part of the value add."

A DeepSeek demo

Snell shared a multistep math problem with Business Insider, which we used to test DeepSeek for ourselves: 

"Find a sequence of +, -, /, * which can be applied to the numbers 7, 3, 11, 5 to get to 24, where each of the given numbers is used exactly once."

BI put that prompt in DeepSeek's chat window on its website. The model responded initially by laying out the challenge ahead.

"Alright, so I've got this problem here: I need to use the numbers 7, 3, 11, and 5, and combine them with the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, using each number exactly once, to get to 24," it replied. "At first glance, this seems a bit tricky, but I think with some systematic thinking, I can figure it out."

It then proceeded through multiple steps over roughly 16 pages of discussion that included mathematical calculations and equations. The model sometimes got it wrong, but it spotted this and didn't give up. Instead, it swiftly moved on to another possible solution. 

"Almost got close there with 33 / 7 * 5 ≈ 23.57, but not quite 24. Maybe I need to try a different approach," it wrote at one point. 

After a few minutes, it found the correct solution. 

"You can see it try different ideas and backtrack," Snell said in an interview on Wednesday. He highlighted this part of DeepSeek's chain of thought as particularly noteworthy:

"This is getting really time-consuming. Maybe I need to consider a different strategy," the AI model wrote. "Instead of combining two numbers at a time, perhaps I should look for a way to group them differently or use operations in a nested manner."

Then Google appears

Snell said other companies are likely working on AI models that use the same inference-time compute approach as OpenAI.

"DeepSeek does this already, so I assume others are working on this," he added on Wednesday.

The following day, Google released Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking. Like DeepSeek, this new model shows users each step of its thought process while tackling problems. 

Jeff Dean, a Google AI veteran, shared a demo on X that showed this new model solving a physics problem and explained its reasoning steps. 

"This model is trained to use thoughts to strengthen its reasoning," Dean wrote. "We see promising results when we increase inference time computation!"

Google will soon take more steps to make AI a part of search, exposing more users to its Gemini agent, according to recent reports and app teardowns.

"AI Mode," shown at the top left of the web results page and inside the Google app, will provide an interface similar to a Gemini AI chat, according to The Information.

This tracks with a finding from Android Authority earlier this month, which noted a dedicated "AI mode" button inside an early beta of the Google app. This shortcut also appeared on Google's Android search widget, and a conversation history button was added to the Google app. Going even deeper into the app, 9to5Google found references to "aim" (AI mode) and "ai_mode" which suggest a dedicated tab in the Google app, with buttons for speaking to an AI or sending it pictures.

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