MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Google used to be all about the 10 blue links, but that was then, and this is now. You have to scroll farther than ever to get to the links in Google search results, and now this trend is being taken to its ultimate conclusion. At I/O, the company has announced a major expansion of AI Mode search, which heralds a new era for its signature product. There are big changes coming, some of which will start rewriting the web sooner than you think.

The past several years at Google have been marked by an all-consuming obsession with generative AI. It has invaded your search results as AI Overviews, but Google has made it clear at I/O 2025 that AI Overviews was just practice. AI Mode is the game. Everyone at Google is acutely aware of this shift—at the end of the I/O keynote, CEO Sundar Pichai showed a cheeky AI counter graphic that tracked how many times speakers had mentioned "AI" and "Gemini." But Google is serious about AI in general and AI search in particular.

To that end, the AI Mode search that first debuted a few months ago as a Labs experiment is graduating to the main Google search page for everyone, and it's available to everyone. It's not the default way of searching the web, but it seems like only a matter of time before that happens. According to Pichai, people search more and enter longer, more complex queries in AI Mode, which is exactly the kind of search AI is good at handling.

Read full article

Comments

© Ryan Whitwam

Back in late 2023, reports began circulating that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had teamed up with legendary Apple designer Jony Ive and Laurene Powell Jobs on a stealth AI hardware project. Now, five months later, we’re finally getting a clearer […]

The post OpenAI and Jony Ive team up to create “a new generation of AI-powered computers” first appeared on Tech Startups.

Ive and fellow iPhone vets will have a say on ChatGPT development, though they still won’t tell us what the hell they’re making.

Io, a firm Ive and Sam Altman cocreated, will now merge with OpenAI.

Crusoe Energy Systems, a Denver-based AI infrastructure startup serving the energy sector, is stepping into the AI big league. The company has secured $11.6 billion to scale up a massive data center in Abilene, Texas, set to become OpenAI’s largest […]

The post AI infrastructure startup Crusoe raises $11.6 billion to build OpenAI’s largest data center in Texas first appeared on Tech Startups.

If you're in a public Discord, your messages may now be science.

Google says its video generation tools, Flow and Veo 3, are enough to turn you, a lowly human, into a filmmaker, but that's more than debatable.

Shopify just made it a lot easier for merchants to set up an online store. The e-commerce giant on Wednesday introduced a new feature called AI Store Builder, which lets users generate a fully designed e-commerce site just by entering a […]

The post Shopify launches AI Store Builder, a tool to instantly create E-commerce sites from simple keyword prompts first appeared on Tech Startups.

The company's annual Build conference was disrupted by a series of protests denouncing Microsoft's ties with Israel.

Jack Dorsey’s company went all-in on agents by deploying one capable of building software—and occasionally deleting stuff.

Google is rolling out ads in AI Mode, the AI-powered search function that was launched in March. AI Mode is designed to handle more nuanced or complex questions than AI […]

The new tools come as the company is battling the U.S. Department of Justice in two landmark antitrust rulings.

The New York Times is suing OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement.

Brin joined DeepMind Founder Demis Hassabis to hash out the future of AI onstage at Google I/O this week.

In her new book Empire of AI, journalist Karen Hao chronicles the anxieties around the OpenAI office in its early days.

Three years ago, as the pandemic caused chaos for companies big and small, Colgate-Palmolive’s chief supply chain officer Luciano Sieber orchestrated a “logistics blitz.”  The result gave Sieber a better understanding of how Colgate-Palmolive moves its products around the world. But it stuck Sieber with another problem: too much data.  About a year ago, Sieber […]

Is it good when a defense contractor talks about the "cleansing function" of war?

It’s Tuesday, May 20, 2025, and the funding firehose is wide open. We’re back with your daily rundown of the boldest bets and biggest checks fueling the future of tech. Today’s lineup features a wave of innovation across fintech, AI, […]

The post Top tech startup funding news for today, May 20, 2025 first appeared on Tech Startups.

The Microsoft Build 2025 conference in Seattle has entered its second day, and CEO Satya Nadella wasted no time in laying out what could be the company’s boldest vision yet: an open agentic web. In plain terms, Microsoft is betting […]

The post Microsoft Build 2025: All the big AI announcements you need to know first appeared on Tech Startups.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—Google rolled out early versions of Gemini 2.5 earlier this year, marking a significant improvement over the 2.0 branch. For the first time, Google's chatbot felt competitive with the likes of ChatGPT, but it has been "experimental" and later "preview" since then. At I/O 2025, Google announced general availability for Gemini 2.5, and these models will soon be integrated with Chrome. There's also a fancy new subscription plan to get the most from Google's AI. You probably won't like the pricing, though.

Gemini 2.5 goes gold

Even though Gemini 2.5 was revealed a few months ago, the older 2.0 Flash has been the default model all this time. Now that 2.5 is finally ready, the 2.5 Flash model will be swapped in as the new default. This model has built-in simulated reasoning, so its outputs are much more reliable than 2.0 Flash.

Google says the release version of 2.5 Flash is better at reasoning, coding, and multimodality, but it uses 20–30 percent fewer tokens than the preview version. This edition is now live in Vertex AI, AI Studio, and the Gemini app. It will be made the default model in early June.

Read full article

Comments

© Ryan Whitwam