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 August 7, 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 tiny folded paper boat with faint red, yellow, green, and blue coloring rests motionless at the center of a mirror-still marsh pond at night, half-reflected in the glassy black water, surrounded by soft reeds and thin mist, under a vast deep indigo sky filled with silver starlight that reflects perfectly below, a faint warm glow low on the distant horizon, painterly nocturne in the style of American Tonalism and Luminism, bold clean title type across the upper night sky in generous negative space.
This Week in Google News
Summary by Claude Sonnet 5.5 based on this week’s links:
- DeepMind leadership shake-up: Demis Hassabis moved to Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, Koray Kavukcuoglu takes over leading GDM, and Jeff Dean is leaving after 27 years. Commentators like Nathan Lambert and Ethan Mollick framed it as a sign Gemini has struggled to keep pace.
- Gemini reaching into everyday tools: Google said Gemini Spark can now use Chrome's auto browse, with permission and your logged-in accounts, to handle errands like scheduling apartment viewings. Cursor also added plugins giving its agents access to Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Docs, and Sheets.
- WeatherNext cyclone forecasting: Google DeepMind's WeatherNext 2 model, published in Nature, gives roughly an extra 24 hours of lead time on tropical cyclones, and Google is open sourcing it. In contrast, Google pulled its Earth image-generation feature after people shared misleading screenshots.
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
So much in the Herald Release of Hermes Agent – Voice Activated Chats (Replace your google home and alexas!) – Plugins and Kanban for the Desktop GUI App – Agent2Agent Protocol – Outbound Webhooks – Massive performance optimizations and token efficiency milestones reached -“
https://x.com/Teknium/status/2084344999513383195
Gemini Spark can now tap into @GoogleChrome’s auto browse feature to take care of complex errands for you online 🔎 With your permission, Gemini Spark can use your logged-in accounts to take care of tasks like scheduling viewings for apartments you’ve saved or researching flight”
https://x.com/Google/status/2084306026577244627
Meta, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI to meet Trump officials about AI safety testing | Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/world/us-finalizes-voluntary-ai-safety-tests-white-house-official-says-2026-08-03/
New w/ @leomschwartz: The Trump administration has invited companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google to the White House on Tuesday to preview the new AI voluntary framework. More here:”
https://x.com/steph_palazzolo/status/2084290183743074452
The next chapter of our AI momentum
https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/next-chapter-ai-momentum/
AI model achieves breakthrough in forecasting cyclones … Google DeepMind
https://deepmind.google/blog/weathernext-ai-model-achieves-breakthrough-in-forecasting-cyclones/
Cursor can now read, write, and act across your Google Workspace. New plugins give agents direct access to Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar, Docs, and Sheets.”
https://x.com/cursor_ai/status/2084376701539405904
Google Maps’ Ask Maps gets more helpful with food ordering
https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/maps/order-food-in-ask-maps/
Google Workspace Plugins · Cursor
https://cursor.com/changelog/google-workspace-plugins
Got a couple of Gemini agents working together on a thing, they named themselves Castor and Pollux, and I’m in love with that.”
https://x.com/fofrAI/status/2085305936625774838
Small Gemini API update: you can now use the Google Maps and Google Search tool at the same time with Gemini 3.5 Flash and 3.6 Flash Been on the backlog for a long time, glad we landed it!!”
https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2084469065322729817
what exactly can you build in ai studio? here’s @vamsibatchuk demoing his financial analysis app called tickr, built with managed agents”
https://x.com/GoogleAIStudio/status/2084701168551227517
Given today, it is surprising how daring Microsoft & Google were initially with AI. Microsoft released GPT-4 before OpenAI, didn’t back down after Sydney & got Copilot to market quickly (the 1st professional AI tool) Google had the first deep research & pivoted fast with Bard.”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2084497674112254059
I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life, and as we enter this pivotal moment, I’m stepping into a new role as Chair of Google DeepMind & Chief Scientist of Alphabet. This will allow me to focus on long-term strategy, and accelerating scientific breakthroughs, including”
https://x.com/demishassabis/status/2085034334914769203
Got sick of hand-tuning GPU kernels, so we built a compiler. Photon 2.0 compiles Moondream, Qwen 3.5, and Gemma 4 into megakernels: the entire forward pass in one GPU program.”
https://x.com/vikhyatk/status/2084409834523476073
The new cybersecurity tests and hacking benchmark have been finalized, and META, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google have been invited to the White House tomorrow to discuss the details.”
https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2084405669894201807
OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Thinking Machines fight for AI talent
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/03/ai-talent-wars-openai-google-meta-anthropic
thank you to the ~800,000 of you that pre-ordered our mobile app on iOS and Android … it’s clear that people are interested in building software on the go instead of asking you to download yet another app we’ve decided to take an entirely different approach: one where apps”
https://x.com/GoogleAIStudio/status/2083274575769473092?s=20
VLM backbone or World Model? What’s the right kind of training data? Google DeepMind’s Kanishka Rao on how we might land on the recipe that solves robotics in the next 2-3 years.”
https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/2083067365462528413
The Fast Gemma Challenge: our verified-SOTA recipe, in full
https://huggingface.co/blog/FINAL-Bench/fast-gemma
We introduce Maple-Preview, an open-source 20B-A1B ternary-weight reasoning LLM, SOTA in its weight class. It solves IMO-level problems and runs at 200+ tokens/s on a Mac Mini M4, 5-16× faster than efficient models like Gemma 4, Qwen3.5, and gpt-oss.
https://x.com/deepgrove_ai/status/2084727154928189783
Exclusive: Longtime Google DeepMind researcher David Silver leaves to found his own AI startup
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-long-time-google-deepmind-140058360.html
Google is working on Plugins for Gemini Enterprise
https://www.testingcatalog.com/google-is-working-on-plugins-for-gemini-enterprise/
Hassabis Steps Aside at Google DeepMind, Jeff Dean Exits
https://www.implicator.ai/google-deepmind-hassabis-steps-aside-jeff-dean-exit/
how quickly the tables have turned Meta is starting to look like Google… moving fast, shipping AI products, and finally building momentum meanwhile, mighty Google suddenly looks like last year’s Meta: confused, reactive, and somehow watching everyone else move faster”
https://x.com/haider1/status/2085092282622189613
I didn’t realize Denny Zhou, who led the Gemini Reasoning Team, left Google 4 months ago for Meta’s TBD Lab. A lot of people left Google recently. I’m still waiting for Gemini to catch up in coding. Time for Sergey to pull a Code Red.”
https://x.com/Yuchenj_UW/status/2069994474277920824
It is not a novel observation at this point, but the collapse of Google’s Gemini as a frontier model series is still astonishing. Unlike Meta & SpaceX, Google has captive Gemini customers at an enterprise level, so the fact that they are pushed towards Gemini 3.1 Pro is a problem”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2085421134535610768
Major restructuring at Gemini (Dean out, Hassabis no longer CEO). This story will be studied forever as the incumbant with all the advantages not being able to get going. P.s. OpenAI accomplished their original goal.”
https://x.com/natolambert/status/2085036262705238460
Google withdraws Earth AI tool after misinformation warnings
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9349yx2ydvo
This paper by researchers from MIT and Stanford finds that most people would be financially better off if they followed the financial advice of LLMs (GPT-5.2 & Gemini 3 Flash) But some people get a bit better advice than others, which largely depends on the questions they ask.”
https://x.com/emollick/status/2085174123743842448
Google is aiming to close feature gaps on Gemini desktop
https://www.testingcatalog.com/google-is-aiming-to-close-feature-gaps-on-gemini-desktop/
Launch your side hustle with @GeminiApp using these five tips ↓ No massive budget or months of planning needed. Here’s how: 🧵 1️⃣ Turn your ideas into a business plan Notebooks in Gemini let you create a centralized command center with all of your chats, files, references, and”
https://x.com/Google/status/2084403188686594443
Model routing with Google Cloud API Gateway – Google Developers Blog
https://developers.googleblog.com/a-unified-api-for-ai-model-routing/
Thanks, @sundarpichai, honored to lead GDM into this next chapter. This is such a pivotal moment for us as we double down on our Gemini models, frontier AI research, and the products we build for our users and partners. I want to congratulate @demishassabis on his new role as”
https://x.com/koraykv/status/2085036328258036102
Thirteen years ago, a quick email exchange with @JeffDean brought me to @Google. After an unforgettable journey from Brain, to DeepMind, and to @GoogleDeepMind, working on seq2seq or distillation, and co-leading huge projects such as AlphaStar, and Gemini, I’m saying goodbye to”
https://x.com/OriolVinyalsML/status/2085034508777304440
Tomorrow will be my last day at Google after 27 years, and watching it grow from 25 people to 190,000+ has been an amazing journey. Below is a note I shared with many people internally at Google today. An excerpt is: It has been an absolute pleasure to work with you and to help”
https://x.com/JeffDean/status/2085083442669318443
What are you vibe coding this week?”
https://x.com/GoogleAIStudio/status/2084305831395270983
will go down in history as one of the most stacked pitch decks ever made. fun story: back in 2021 i wrote a hot take / analysis that went viral inside google. someone sent it to jeff and we ended up chatting. he agreed with some of the suggestions and immediately sent it to my”
https://x.com/bilawalsidhu/status/2085128340084601304
One day later and nano banana inside google earth has been rolled back. Some say earth is the evidentiary layer and no place for gen ai slop. Others say it’s a useful filter on reality and misinformation is already a screenshot away. What’s ironic is this imagery was”
https://x.com/bilawalsidhu/status/2083401004058308643
Re: our statement on Image Generation in Google Earth: “We know that people uniquely trust Google Earth for a reliable view of the world. We’ve seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we’ve also seen people sharing screenshots of”
https://x.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/2083249962150760610
A conversation with the Google DeepMind Robotics team about our latest Gemini Robotics 2 model, the arc of robotics progress, and where we go next 🤖”
https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2083291516689322483
I’m excited to share that I’ll be joining OpenAI and look forward to working with the exceptional team there. It was a difficult decision to move on. I’m incredibly proud of the amazing team at Google and everything we’ve built together. It has been an honor and a pleasure to”
https://x.com/NoamShazeer/status/2067400851438932297
Our WeatherNext 2 AI model from @GoogleDeepMind and @GoogleResearch can predict tropical cyclones with an extra day of lead time. Now, we’re open sourcing the model. Published in @Nature, Google researchers demonstrate how it delivers roughly a decade’s worth of weather”
https://x.com/NewsFromGoogle/status/2085430910103716273
During Hurricane Melissa, WeatherNext gave forecasters early predictions of its Category 5 landfall 5 days in advance with 80% confidence. This year, we’re providing 1,000 probabilistic predictions per storm to support forecasters, now accessible via WeatherLab →”
https://x.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/2085395450656428306
Predicting cyclones accurately can help save lives – and every hour of lead time counts. Published in @Nature, our AI model WeatherNext achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in forecasting a storm’s track and intensity, giving us a critical extra 24 hours to prepare on average. 🧵”
https://x.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/2085395442347524506
Leave a Reply