Fair. Might be setting up his plan-b.

Possible, but the image they sent to journalists trying to verify their story contained an SynthID watermark, so that's a problem. A deeper dive than the Verge article: https://www.hardresetmedia.com...

Yes, it is. Can you show me in any meaningful way where the Google summaries are better than Gemini?

Looking at https://educationdata.org/coll... enrollment at 4 year public schools has increased consistently YoY. Most of the enrollment drop (around 2M compared to the peak in 2010) has been at 2-year state schools.

My conspiracy theory is he is setting himself up to rule there after his term is over.

Didn't mean to imply it. Let me clear: it is a fact.

Small factual questions yes, they appear to. You can get identical (word-for-word) answers from different sessions, indicating they are being cached. For instance "What is the minimum wage in california". I do wonder how often the caches are refreshed though. The minimum wage one referenced Jan 1, 2026 in the responses it sent me.

However use a more in-depth search topic and you get different wording between answers so those for sure are not cached. "What is a realistic timeline for AGI" for example, gives me different answers between sessions (normal vs incognito browser). Different wording and one claimed between 200 and 2060 while the other response had 2040-2075. Variations can also trigger different answers, "When was the first iPhone released" vs "When did Apple release the first iPhone". So while they can cache some answers to help reduce compute, they still need to do a lot of unique calls. Again, if you consider the sheer volume of google searches per day, even if every search does not get a AI summary or gets a cached one, it's still a fuck-ton of inference time for the ones that go to the model for an response.

The AI summaries on Google searches are a prime example of issues of trying to provide AI, for 'free', at a huge scale. If you compare it to the regular version of Gemini it's obvious they are squeezing it as much as they can to cut down on inference costs. Thinking about how many searches are done on Google every day, that cost has got to be massive, even for a company like Google. The answers are so hilariously unreliable I've stopped even looking at them. It may give me the info I need, but I'll spend more time verifying that than I would just relying on a normal search.

Apparently many in the government were also surprised.

Rumor is only for the 18, not the 18 Pro or Pro Max. Basically they are splitting the Pro launch from the regular non-pro launch. So the rumor goes.

I agree on the mileage idea, but would like to point out that only 19 of 50 states have annual inspections. You are going to need some way that isn't a PITA or a privacy issue (electronic metering) to get true mileage in the other 31.

Well then break open your piggy bank and fund a new factory. That's the only way it's going to happen. There are fewer and fewer uses for them every year. It is, how the kids say, "not a growth industry". If it were economically viable someone would have kept or bought a factory to keep it running.

This. Raise prices by 30% across the board and use it to pay them. Then everyone will be happy.

They eventually want to move everyone from Hyper-V to Azure Local (formerly Azure Stack HCI). I don't see them putting a lot of effort into Hyper-V right now. The other issue with Hyper-V is that MS followed VMWare and made their advanced management tools (SCVMM) a premium feature and most places don't pay for it, making Hyper-V a pain to deploy and manage.

In 2020 when they moved to virtual events they gave out digital store access for attending some of the first conferences. I bought up enough years of 365 to last me through 2030. Also bought a bunch of Windows Pro licenses since they were insanely cheap.