Europe could force Google to open Android to other AI assistants

The $100 Fitbit Air is available for preorder today.

The Fitbit Air can be preordered today and will be available starting May 26th. | Image: Google It's a Whoop dupe. That was my first thought when I saw the new $99 Google Fitbit Air. You can hardly blame me. The band is screenless with a metallic fabric clasp. My eyes flickered between the Fitbit Air and my wrist, where I'm wearing a Whoop MG. Was I not seeing double? But as my press briefing went on, my opinion started changing. The Air is sort of like the OG Fitbits that Whoop then duped once Fitbit went all in on smartwatches. Think back to 2012, when the Fitbit One could clip to your pants, be turned into a pendant, or dangle from a keychain. That device was mostly a pedometer, whereas the Air is more of a modern, modular sensor t … Read the full story at The Verge.

Also in today’s newsletter: a new company seeks to tackle the power constraints on European data centre growth

Google’s A.I. search technology is far from perfect (don’t count on it for celebrity news), but it excels at tasks like picking out groceries and detecting scams.

Google is updating its AI-powered search experience to surface richer context alongside results, including previews from public online discussions, social media, and firsthand community sources. Links will now display additional metadata such as creator names and community handles to help users evaluate credibility before clicking. The update also highlights links from a user’s existing news […]

Partnership between top startup DeepL and Amazon comes amid concern about Silicon Valley’s monopoly over digital infrastructure AI companies in Europe risk losing their world-leading status in the field of machine translation, industry figures have said, after the decision by one of the continent’s leading startups to partner with Amazon’s cloud computing division provoked alarm. While businesses in the EU have generally lagged behind the US and China in AI adoption, a small group of European companies have cornered the global market for high-quality machine translations for professional use. Continue reading...

Google has pulled the plug on Project Mariner, an experimental feature designed to perform tasks for you across the web, as reported earlier by Wired's Maxwell Zeff. The Project Mariner landing page now contains a message that says: "Thank you for using Project Mariner. It was shut down on May 4th, 2026 and its technology voyaged to other Google products." Google first revealed Project Mariner in December 2024 and later announced an update allowing it to perform up to 10 tasks at a time. Over the past year, Google has integrated features powered by Project Mariner into its other AI tools, including Gemini Agent, which can do things like arc … Read the full story at The Verge.

Google Chrome can automatically download a local AI model that takes up to 4 gigabytes of hard drive space on a computer when certain AI features are enabled, according to The Verge. The file, called weights.bin, is used by Google’s Gemini Nano AI model to provide writing assistance, autocomplete, and fraud protection directly on the device. (Nano has been around since Gemini was introduced in late 2023.) Since the model runs locally, the AI data is stored on the computer instead of in the cloud, which can provide better privacy, but also takes up storage space. Users can check whether the file is present by looking for the OptGuideOnDeviceModel folder in Chrome’s system files. To free up the space, users need to disable the on-device feature in Chrome’s settings under Settings > System.