AI Updates on 2025-05-20

AI Model Announcements

  • Google announces Gemini 2.5 Pro with "Deep Think" mode that uses parallel thinking techniques to consider multiple hypotheses before responding @demishassabis @OfficialLoganK
  • Google introduces Gemini 2.5 Flash, a faster model that will be generally available in early June, pushing the pareto frontier of performance @sundarpichai @OfficialLoganK
  • Veo 3, Google's state-of-the-art video generation model with native audio generation capabilities, is now available for Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US @GoogleDeepMind @JeffDean
  • Imagen 4, Google's latest image generation model, is now live with improved details, more nuanced color, and better text outputs @GeminiApp
  • Google announces Gemma 3n, a new model optimized for mobile on-device usage with multimodality and fast inference @demishassabis
  • Google introduces Lyria 2 for YouTube shorts and on Vertex @AndrewCurran_

AI Research

  • New paper on ARC-AGI-2 released, covering design principles, analysis of human performance, and current model performance @fchollet
  • Google introduces Gemini Diffusion, a research model that's significantly faster than previous models while matching coding performance by correcting errors during thinking @GoogleAI
  • Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro with Deep Think achieves 49.4% on USAMO (USA Mathematical Olympiad), a significant advancement in mathematical reasoning @quocleix
  • Meta introduces Adjoint Sampling, a new learning algorithm that trains generative models based on scalar rewards, with theoretical foundations developed by FAIR @AIatMeta
  • NVIDIA releases Cosmos-Reason1-7B, described as the first reasoning model for robotics, based on Qwen 2.5-VL-7B @huggingface
  • New research paper suggests potential issues with deep learning representations and proposes solutions for improvement @jeffclune
  • Meta releases OMol25, a dataset of 100M+ molecular conformers spanning 83 elements for training machine learning models with DFT-level accuracy @huggingface

AI Applications

  • Google launches Flow, a filmmaking tool that combines Veo, Imagen, and Gemini models to help create cinematic clips and narratives @GoogleDeepMind
  • Google introduces Jules, a coding agent that lets users make changes to GitHub repos with English prompts in a VM using Gemini 2.5 Pro @deedydas @eugeneyan
  • Google announces Gemini in Chrome, an AI browsing assistant that provides summaries and answers without switching tabs @GeminiApp
  • Google introduces Agent Mode in Gemini App to help users complete tasks across the web @sundarpichai
  • Google launches AI Mode in Search, using "query fan out" technique to break queries into subtopics and generate comprehensive responses @GoogleAI
  • Google introduces SynthID Detector, a portal to identify if digital content was generated by Google's AI tools, already used 10 billion times @GoogleDeepMind
  • Google announces Google Beam, a 3D video communications platform that transforms 2D video streams into realistic 3D experiences @GoogleAI
  • Microsoft announces Grok 3 API support coming to Azure, though with limited transparency regarding security and model details @emollick
  • Stability AI upgrades Stable Video Diffusion 4D to Stable Video 4D 2.0, improving quality of 4D outputs generated from a single object-centric video @StabilityAI
  • Google's NotebookLM app is now available on the App Store with Video Overviews feature @demishassabis @OfficialLoganK
  • SAP partners with Cohere to embed enterprise-ready agentic AI into SAP Business Suite @cohere

AI Industry Analysis

  • Google reports processing 480 trillion tokens monthly across products and APIs, a 50x increase year-over-year @sundarpichai @OfficialLoganK
  • Google's Gemini app has over 400 million monthly active users, with 7 million developers building with the Gemini API (4x growth) @OfficialLoganK
  • ChatGPT daily active users have increased more than 4x over the last year, with messages per day growing even more significantly @sama
  • Google AI Overviews are now used by 1.5 billion people monthly across 200+ countries and territories @sundarpichai
  • Meta's Llama models will be direct first-party offerings in Azure AI Foundry, hosted and sold by Microsoft @AIatMeta
  • AI coding tools companies predominantly focus on React and TypeScript demos, while Microsoft showcases Java and .NET case studies as a strategic differentiation @GergelyOrosz
  • One side-effect of AI coding is that "everyone is an IC now" (individual contributor) @alexgraveley
  • The narrative that AI use will collapse due to data limits, costs, environmental factors, or regulation is not useful, as over a billion people use this technology with self-reported high utility @emollick

AI Ethics & Society

  • AI Now Institute launching research on AI's growing energy demands and the industry's turn to nuclear energy, focusing on infrastructure, safety, and oversight risks @AINowInstitute
  • Berkeley AI Research paper explores how frontier AI is reshaping cybersecurity, predicting attackers may gain more immediate advantages than defenders in the short term @berkeley_ai
  • World Bank randomized controlled study finds using GPT-4 as a tutor with teacher guidance in a six-week after-school program in Nigeria had "more than twice the effect of some of the most effective interventions in education" at very low costs @emollick
  • State of AI in Design Report released, surveying hundreds of designers and leaders from companies like Notion, Stripe, Ramp, Anthropic, and Perplexity on AI adoption in design @benblumenrose