Google is upgrading the free version of Gemini with 1.5 Flash, a multimodal AI model that prioritizes low latency and cost. Compared to 1.0 Pro, Gemini 1.5 Flash offers noticeable improvements in reasoning and image understanding, as well as across-the-board improvements in quality and latency. The context window has increased 4x to 32,000 tokens, allowing for longer back-and-forth conversations and more complex questions.

Source: https://9to5google.com/

Airflow DAGs and tasks can be improved with Deferrable Operators, which can suspend themselves and free up worker slots when idle, allowing for better resource utilization in Cloud Composer. This feature helps reduce wasted resources on idle operators and sensors, enabling more efficient task concurrency.

Source: https://cloud.google.com/blog/

Google's new Pixel Buds Pro 2 will feature wing tips, as revealed in a leak. The design is similar to the 2020 Pixel Buds, with arc-shaped wing tips extruding from the black body of the earbuds. The wing tips are located on a level underneath the touch-sensitive dome, opposite the eartip on the other side.

Source: https://9to5google.com/

Google is offering the Google Pixel Watch 2 at an all-time low price of $269.99 shipped on Amazon. The watch, which normally retails for $350, is available in various styles. Additionally, the 43-inch TCL Q5 4K QLED Google Smart TV is available for $198 shipped, and the Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3 is $140 off its regular price.

Source: https://9to5google.com/

Google Messages has introduced face filters, allowing users to launch a fullscreen camera from the app bar on the home screen or inside a conversation. The filters work on both the front-facing and rear cameras, offering nine options including ones that remove wrinkles, add glasses, and turn users into animals. This feature is a port from Google Meet, which already offers similar filters.

Source: https://9to5google.com/

Google is reportedly preparing an upgrade to its display technology, with the Pixel 9 featuring a 6.24-inch 1080 x 2424 display at 120Hz, and a peak brightness of 1,000 nits during HDR. The Pixel 9 Pro and Pixel 9 Pro XL are expected to have similar displays, but with slightly larger sizes.

Source: https://9to5google.com/

Google has redesigned Chrome's downloads tray UI to provide more security warnings, allowing for more detailed warning messages that convey more nuance about the nature of the danger. The new design uses a two-tier download warning taxonomy, with gray triangles for suspicious files and red stop signs for dangerous files, based on AI-powered Google Safe Browsing malware verdicts. This update has resulted in significant changes in user behavior, with fewer warnings bypassed.

Source: https://9to5mac.com/

Google Cloud's unified data platform, comprising BigQuery and Dataproc, is designed to meet the evolving needs of companies building generative AI applications. The platform provides a path to data modernization with built-in capabilities for data lakehouse architectures, enabling organizations to unlock their data's full potential and drive innovation.

Source: https://cloud.google.com/blog/

Google is reportedly working on new headphones, likely called Pixel Buds Pro 2, which may come in four colors: Haze (gray), Porcelain (beige), Raspberry, and Mojito. The colors Raspberry and Mojito are considered fun colors, with Raspberry being similar to the pink Pixel 9 and Mojito being a bit more green than the current Lemongrass.

Source: https://9to5google.com/

Google Cloud is the first hyperscaler to introduce Codestral, Mistral AI's open-weight generative AI model for code generation tasks, as a fully-managed service in Vertex AI Model Garden. The service is available today, and Mistral AI's latest large language models, including Mistral Large V2 and Mistral Nemo, are also available via Model-as-a-Service endpoints.

Source: https://cloud.google.com/blog/