Every week, I organize 400 to 700 links into roughly 60 categories as part of my ongoing effort to learn about AI. This is my personal notebook, which I enjoy sharing with friends… a hobby and a labor of love, rather than a commercial publication or product.
If you arrived here through a search or shared link, this page collects the links I found for Google for the week ending July 31, 2026.
As part of my learning process, I like to automate the category covers. It gives me a chance to learn Python and APIs.
This week’s cover prompt was written using Claude Opus 4.7, and the image was generated using Gemini 3.1 Flash Image Preview.
Category Cover Image Prompt: A 1973 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu in matte primer gray idling at an empty downtown Los Angeles intersection beneath a tall traffic signal with four stacked lamps glowing red, yellow, green, and blue reflecting in long smears across wet black asphalt, gloved hand on the gearshift seen through the windshield, a tiny golden-yellow scorpion enamel pin on the dashboard, the category name 'Google' scrawled in hot magenta-pink handwritten brush script in the upper third, 1980s neo-noir movie poster, 35mm anamorphic grain with soft halation, long-lens compression, crushed blacks, cinematic negative space.
This Week in Google News
Summary by Claude Sonnet 5.5 based on this week’s links:
- Robotics took over the week: Google DeepMind launched Gemini Robotics 2, described as a single model that can drive different robot hands and grippers, including Apptronik's Apollo 2 humanoid tying knots and sealing a ziplock bag. A companion model, Gemini Robotics ER 2, handles planning and spatial reasoning and is available in the Gemini API.
- Open models and policy: Demis Hassabis said Gemma 4 has passed 300 million downloads and the Gemma family 900 million. Separately, a letter urging policymakers not to restrict open-weight models went out without Google's signature, and DeepMind staff were reported to be circulating a different letter about ways to pace AI development.
- Smaller product moves: The Gemini Managed Agents API gained environment hooks, model selection and a free tier, with Gemini 3.6 Flash as the new default agent model. Google also announced Lyria 3.5 in Flow Music and put Nano Banana inside Google Earth.
This summary was generated by Claude Sonnet 5.5 to help you explore the links below. Rest assured, I select, organize, and check the links by hand in Google Sheets, and write the introduction and personal commentary in The Main Newsletters myself each week as a labor of love.
This week's links related to Google
Hey Hermes – Replace your Google Home, Alexa, whatever you got with Hermes Agent on any device that can run the GUI or CLI locally! Voice activation is now in Hermes Agent along with many other voice chat improvements. To toggle listening for wake word on, just click the ear”
https://x.com/Teknium/status/2082510413162553674
Nvidia is making a “substantial” investment in Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, and providing enough GPUs to increase its compute tenfold. SSI had previously relied mainly on Google’s TPUs. The new long-term partnership gives the secretive AI lab access to Nvidia’s”
https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2081740668125225229
Yes, this is the real Jensen Huang. Satya Nadella shared the same letter this morning. It was released simultaneously by the companies and organizations listed here, urging policymakers not to restrict open-weight models. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI did not sign the letter.”
https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2080668162765520955
NEW: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind staff are circulating a letter asking the US government to support a mechanism that could help “deliberately pace” AI development if needed, bc of risks of the technology becoming out of control w/ @rachelmetz”
https://x.com/shiringhaffary/status/2082168375036309969
New: The AI industry might finally get some clarity as the Trump administration prepares to release the voluntary framework it laid out in its early June executive order ahead of the Aug. 1 deadline. The White House circulated a draft with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google around two”
https://x.com/leomschwartz/status/2081843004394831910
Welcome to Gemini Robotics ER 2! 🤖 A new embodied reasoning model for robotics, available in the Gemini API It can be used to understand physical world, plan multi-step tasks, chat with humans- from multi-robot collaboration to advanced spatial reasoning.”
https://x.com/osanseviero/status/2082860665207767259
Introducing Lyria 3.5 in Google Flow Music
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-labs/lyria-3-5/
just to clarify: Gemma 4 models have been downloaded 300M+ times, the Gemma open model series as a whole has been downloaded an incredible 900M+ times!!”
https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2081075346208600103?s=20
Really cool: Google DeepMind says Gemini Robotics 2 can control a humanoid’s entire body, from walking and crouching to manipulating objects with five-fingered hands. The system combines three models: Gemini Robotics 2 converts vision and instructions into movement. -ER 2 plans”
https://x.com/kimmonismus/status/2082879395149074629
For decades, we’ve dreamed of robots that can seamlessly step into our world and lend a hand. Today, we take a major stride toward making that dream a reality: Introducing Gemini Robotics 2 from @GoogleDeepMind, the intelligence layer powering the next generation of truly”
https://x.com/GoogleAI/status/2082844740446253125
Gemini Robotics ER 2
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/google-deepmind/gemini-robotics-er-2/
Google DeepMind just introduced Gemini Robotics 2. It’s a single VLA that unlocks physical dexterity across different end effectors, hands or grippers, from one model checkpoint. Apptronik’s Apollo 2 humanoid, with the 22-DoF SharpaWave hand, ties knots and seals a ziplock bag”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2082844644887744880
Introducing Gemini Robotics ER 2, our latest robotics embodied reasoning model based on Gemini. So much progress from our last ER model (and baseline Gemini 3.6 Flash). Very excited to see more robots do useful things with this model!”
https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2082847444195553770
One brain. For any robot. 🤖 We’re launching Gemini Robotics 2: our next-generation physical AI bringing full body intelligence to humanoids, advanced dexterity, multi-robot teamwork and more.”
https://x.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/2082844162928381956
Today we are shipping more updates to the Gemini Managed Agents API: – Support for model Environment hooks (block, lint, etc) – Ability to select a specific model (3.6 Flash) – Free tier support in the UI & API – Updated default agent to use 3.6 Flash”
https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2082138993546899711
My conversation with Kanishka Rao, who went from working on particle physics at CERN to driving robotics at @GoogleDeepMind. We get into the Gemini Robotics 2 release, trending training recipes in the industry, physical AGI, world models, and more. 1:00 Intro 1:47 Does AI’s”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2082852800011395232
DeepMind won a Nobel for AlphaFold. Then it broke up the team.
https://thenextweb.com/news/deepmind-alphafold-team-dismantled-gemini-anthropic
PSA: Your Claude shared chats and Artifacts may have ended up on Google | TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/27/psa-your-claude-shared-chats-and-artifacts-may-have-ended-up-on-google/
Automating AI research is going to look a lot more like data cleaning than it is going to look like inventing the transformer”
https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2081117440990404649
Google is working on interactive Apps for Gemini Notebook
https://www.testingcatalog.com/google-is-working-on-interactive-apps-for-gemini-notebook/
love me a good pareto frontier…”
https://x.com/demishassabis/status/1908301867672560087
The answer is probably simple, you’re just not doing the obviously correct things.”
https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2081070747938943209
the extent to which AI progress is data bound is under appreciated by most”
https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2082627343223533830
there’s already some things I’ve stopped using AI for, can’t give up my artisan craft :)”
https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2082669005467529532
Pretty cool! Nano Banana is now inside Google Earth so you can reskin your home, city — or even try your hand at time travel.”
https://x.com/bilawalsidhu/status/2082807923642642847
Gemini Live API overview | Gemini API | Google AI for Developers
https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/live-api?linkId=63011869
Glad to see Google sharing data on how Gemini is being used. Especially interesting is that the usefulness of multimodal AI for manual labor may be greater than expected.
https://x.com/emollick/status/2080511836491747657
Google DeepMind’s Kanishka Rao on the biggest blind spot in today’s robots: they’re all vision-based with no sense of touch. He thinks vision-only dexterity works, until it hits a wall.”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2082884792476180531
Leave a Reply