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21 May 2025

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'An atrocious idea' - outcry over taxpayer-funded octopus farming research
Octopus are wild and solitary. Plans to farm them are therefore cruel, say animal rights advocates.

Google brings AI-powered search to all U.S. users
Whether you embrace it or not, AI is shaping the future of Google Search. Google is bringing AI Mode to Google Search for every U.S. user, beginning today. Google launched AI Overviews a year ago, which aims to answer your question before showing the traditional list of links. AI Mode is the next step: from what Google has shown, the list of links will disappear entirely, replaced by tiny link icons that link back to the information Google is slurping up. Google’s Liz Reid, a Google vice president and head of Google Search, said that AI Overviews totals 1.5 billion users and will be expanded to over 200 countries. At the beginning of May, Google migrated AI Mode out of its Labs environment into a small subset of users in the real world and has apparently replaced the “I’m feeling lucky” button with an AI search button as well. It’s not clear whether AI Mode will be the default search for all U.S. users, or whether Google will allow users to express a preference or preserve the choices they’ve made before. Traditional search doesn’t look like it will go away, but it will be relegated to a different tab, in much the same way a search for “Images” requires you to shift to another search tab within Google. Reid said that it’s bringing AI Mode to AI overviews, too. “We use what we call a query fan-out technique,” Reid said, in describing how AI Mode works. “And this basically takes your question and it breaks it up into different subtopics, and then we search on each of those different search topics that allows us to go way deeper in the web and find that really hyper-relevant, incredibly specific content that might be great with you.” This what Google’s AI Mode has looked like within Google Labs.Foundry Google said that it’s upgrading the version of Gemini that powers its AI Mode to a more advanced version and bringing the technology to mobile, too. “Deep Search” will be more like the “Deep Research” mode in Gemini, where, behind the scenes, Gemini will issue dozens of separate searches and then aggregate the results. Google’s AI Mode may even generate custom graphs to present information from search and finance questions, Reid said. Agentic search is coming to AI Mode, too. What Google has previously known as “Project Mariner” can be used to research the cheapest seats for a specific game. AI Mode will then start digging through various shopping sites and point you to the cheapest seats. Finally, the Project Astra technology Google showed off last year is being added to Gemini Live so that it can “see” through your smartphone’s camera and then talk through any problems you might have. You can also add data from Gmail, Google Drive, etc. to affect your searches. “We’re going to be pulling all of that in,” Reid said. “You’re going to always be in control. So it’s your choice to opt in to doing this in the first place, but you can connect and disconnect it at any time going forward.” Bad news for tech publishers It’s impossible to entirely disconnect what Google is doing or how it will affect major media — meaning that it’s difficult to remain entirely objective. Put simply, Google’s AI overviews and AI Mode pass off third-party news, opinions, roundups, and data as (almost) Google’s own, links or not. Major publishers are beginning to sound alarm bells, and even Google itself is worried about losing money from Google Search ads. Will users click through to the sites where an AI Mode summary originates? Search data says no, though Google disagrees. Google’s AI Overviews in action. Links are either presented as tiny icons or buried at the very bottom of the summary.Google “What we’ve seen with AI overviews is that pages with AI overviews get higher quality clicks to websites,” Reid said. “And you might ask, what does that really mean? And what it means is people spend more time on those websites. They’re not going to those sites and immediately figuring out it’s not what they want and bouncing back. They’re really digging in to the content there, and that’s our goal with AI Mode as well.” Google seems like it’s being pressured by Wall Street, who seem to be wondering if Google will fall behind Anthropic and OpenAI, both of which use AI to replace traditional search results. Microsoft, too, has an AI-powered replacement for Bing Search waiting in the wings called Copilot Search. But Google remains the Web’s top search engine, and it apparently aims to stay that way. “The way you can think about that is AI mode is not just this AI-powered experience end to end, but it also is a glimpse of what’s to come in search overall,” Reid said. Great.

Google AI Ultra is the new luxe AI subscription service for $250/mo
Let’s say you end the month with an extra $250 in your pocket. What do you do with it? You might spend it on a nice dinner out, perhaps with friends. A day trip. A spa treatment. Or maybe… AI? Google’s AI Ultra subscription—a recurring charge, mind you—is the newest way to flaunt your wealth. Announced at Google I/O today, Google says you can have all the best of what Google has on offer, from AI to storage, for “only” $249.99 per month. Google is also renaming its current $19.99-per-month AI Premium plan to “AI Pro” and adding additional features, like access to Flow. “[The AI Ultra plan is] for people who want to be on the absolute cutting edge of AI, from Google,” said Josh Woodward, the vice president of Google Labs and Gemini. Although it’s only available to customers in the United States as of today, Google promises that it will be available to a total of 70 countries soon. Here’s what the AI subscription buys you: Gemini: The AI Ultra subscription will deliver the best of the Gemini app, with the “highest” usage limits for Deep Research, Veo 2 text-to-video access, and early access to Veo 3, which adds audio generation that’s synced with the video. You’ll also get access to the “Deep Think” option within Gemini 2.5 Pro. Gemini is also integrated into Gmail, Docs, Vids, and more. Flow: Google is launching a new AI filmmaking tool that combines Veo, Imagen image generation, and Gemini. It’s designed for creating AI films, with editing capabilities built right in. Whisk: Another experimental technology, Whisk allows for quick image generation but also remixing. NotebookLM: Google is promising that you’ll again receive the highest usage limits and the most advanced models to use in your projects. Gemini in Chrome: Chrome is integrating Gemini and allowing it to use the context of the current page for queries. Project Mariner: Google’s agentic AI, which can be used to manage up to 10 tasks from a common dashboard. Google Drive: A massive 30TB of cloud storage. YouTube Premium Unfortunately, the sky-high price doesn’t come with a new Pixel phone.