Google plans to prioritize scaling its Gemini AI for consumers in the new year, CEO Sundar Pichai told employees during a strategy meeting held earlier this month. The company is facing increased competition from rivals like Perplexity and OpenAI as emerging AI technologies reinvent web search. The company has come under added scrutiny from federal regulators as well this year.
“I think 2025 will be critical,” Pichai remarked to employees assembled at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, as well as those attending virtually. “I think it’s really important we internalize the urgency of this moment, and need to move faster as a company. The stakes are high. These are disruptive moments. In 2025, we need to be relentlessly focused on unlocking the benefits of this technology and solve real user problems.”
To that end, Pichai announced that the company will introduce a number of new AI features in the first half of next year, as well as roll out an update for its highly anticipated Project Asta.
While Google enjoyed strong growth and revenue from its search ads and cloud products this year, recent legal rulings could significantly impact the company’s industry dominance in 2025. In August, Google lost an antitrust case brought by the Department of Justice and 38 state attorneys general when a federal judge found that the company illegally holds a monopoly in the search and text markets.
The DOJ subsequently requested in November that Google be compelled to divest from its Chrome browser division. The company also faces pressure from the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority, which in September alleged that Google “has harmed competition by using its dominance in online display advertising to favor its own ad tech services.”
“It’s not lost on me that we are facing scrutiny across the world,” Pichai said. “It comes with our size and success. It’s part of a broader trend where tech is now impacting society at scale. So more than ever, through this moment, we have to make sure we don’t get distracted.”
“With the Gemini app, there is strong momentum, particularly over the last few months,” Pichai said. “But we have some work to do in 2025 to close the gap and establish a leadership position there as well.” Google is already investing heavily in AI efforts and those investments are likely to increase next year.
“Scaling Gemini on the consumer side will be our biggest focus next year,” he added.
Speech-to-text apps have flooded the App Store, making it easier than ever to type on our Macs with just our voice. I have previously covered one such app called TypeWhisper. However, there has been a dearth of good text-to-speech models, and most of the good ones are locked behind a subscription.
Ollama, an open-source app that lets you run local AI models on your computer, wants to change that. It works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and your prompts are never stored or used for training.
Did you think hitting delete on your AI chatbot conversation actually makes it disappear? Georgia Tech researchers just proved that's not entirely true. They have built a forensic tool called ORISA that can dig deleted conversations from your phone and even rebuild them into a working chatbot session you can keep talking to.
How can ORISA bring deleted AI conversations back?
Touchscreen laptops have been around for years. You can get them in all sizes and shapes. Just not from Apple. For years, the Cupertino giant has treated the idea of a touchscreen MacBook the way I treat a meeting that could have been an email: with open contempt. However, Wednesday looks like the day the company could finally change its mind.
The latest Apple invite puts the “Pro and Tell” showcase in Los Angeles at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on October 28, 2026. Instead of a regular live-streamed keynote, it is an invitation-only, hands-on event for a handful of press and creators (similar to what the company did for the MacBook Neo earlier this year).