Google's Gemini Hits 1B Monthly Users

Google is restructuring its AI leadership, promoting Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind CEO to chair and chief scientist of Alphabet while maintaining his role at Isomorphic Labs. Koray Kavukcuoglu, formerly DeepMind's CTO, becomes SVP of DeepMind and will report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. The moves signal a shift in how Google is organizing its AI strategy at the executive level.

Jasjeet Sekhon, chief strategy officer at Google DeepMind, framed the AI industry's massive capital expenditures as a bet on recursive self-improvement (RSI), the ability of AI systems to automatically create better versions of themselves. Speaking at UC Berkeley's Agentic AI Summit, Sekhon called RSI a key part of the investment thesis. The framing signals a shift in how the industry publicly justifies unprecedented spending, with RSI emerging as the new goalpost after AGI dominated earlier discourse.

Google DeepMind introduced Gemini Robotics 2, a suite of AI models designed to give robots whole-body control, dexterous manipulation, and multi-robot collaboration capabilities. The system includes three models: a vision-language-action model for motor control, an embodied reasoning model for planning and communication, and an on-device model optimized for fast adaptation to new robot bodies. Early-access partners can now deploy these models on humanoid and bi-arm robots to perform complex, multi-step tasks in unstructured environments.

Google's AI Overviews now appear in 43% of searches, marking a significant shift in how users encounter information online. The feature, which provides AI-generated answers directly in search results, has achieved rapid adoption since its introduction. This trend reflects a broader move toward AI-mediated information discovery rather than traditional link-based search results.