Google DeepMind Workers Vote to Unionize Over Military AI Deals

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.

The words “pressure” and “NHS” go hand in hand in the UK and unfortunately there is no sign of a reduction in the strain the institution suffers any time soon. As NHS England continues the struggle to reduce its 7.25 million waiting list, new policies are being introduced to move care away from hospitals and […] The post AI helping ease the UK’s NHS burden appeared first on AI News.

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 […]

The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), a division of the US Department of Commerce, has signed agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI that would give the agency the ability to vet AI models from these organizations and others prior to their being made publicly available. According to a release from CAISI, which is part of the department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), it will “conduct pre-deployment evaluations and targeted research to better assess frontier AI capabilities and advance the state of AI security.” The three join Anthropic and OpenAI, which signed similar agreements almost two years ago during the Biden administration, when CAISI was known as the US Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute. An August 2024 release about those agreements indicated that the institute planned to provide feedback to both companies on “potential safety improvements to their models, in close collaboration with its partners at the UK AI Safety In

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.

Move comes as CCP Games spends $120M to go independent, rebrands as Fenris Creations.