Gemini Nano

Chrome downloads a 4GB AI file without user consent, researcher alleges

Chrome downloads a 4GB AI file without user consent, researcher alleges If you've paid any attention to Google lately, you know that it wants us using its AI tools. So much so that Chrome apparently downloads a 4GB file containing details for running Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Computer scientist Alexander Hanff published the details earlier this week on his website The Privacy Guy and goes into extreme detail on why this isn't a good look for Google.

MMAE: A Massive Multitask Audio Editing Benchmark

arXiv:2606.07229v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce MMAE, a Massive Multitask Audio Editing benchmark, serving as the first comprehensive evaluation testbed designed for general-purpose instruction-based audio editing. Spurred by the shift toward intelligent creation, interactive editing has rapidly expanded from visual domains, pioneered by models like Nano-banana 2 for images and Gemini-Omni for video, into audio. However, the current evaluation infrastructure lags severely,...

Google shuts down the AI image app Pixel Studio

Google shuts down the AI image app Pixel Studio It launched less than two years ago. Google has shut down its Pixel Studio app with the latest update, according to a report by 9to5Google. The AI-powered image generation app launched less than two years ago and received a fairly substantial content update last year.

Google has seriously leaned into AI enshittification lately

Google cuts the price of its AI Plus plan and doubles the storage

Google cuts the price of its AI Plus plan and doubles the storage The subscription now starts at $5 per month. Google is lowering the cost of its cheapest AI subscription to make Gemini models even easier to access. The Google AI Plus plan will now cost $5 per month, according to a post from Vikas Kansal, the company's Product Lead focused on Gemini AI subscriptions, down from its original $8 per month price.

Threat hunters find Google API keys still usable 23 minutes after deletion

InstantRetouch: Efficient and High-Fidelity Instruction-Guided Image Retouching with Bilateral Space

Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-guided photo retouching aims to adjust color and tone while preserving geometry and texture. Recently, diffusion-based retouching shows a superior visual quality, but often struggles with both fidelity issues due to its generative nature and efficiency because of its iterative sampling process. In this work, we propose an efficient and fidelity-preserving retouching method using bilateral space manipulation, which is both compact and content-decoupled.

Gemini in Chrome expands further to Latin America and the Middle East

Gemini in Chrome expands further to Latin America and the Middle East The AI browser feature is now available in nearly every region around the world, with the rather large exception of Europe. Gemini in Chrome continues to roll out and has now landed in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, Google announced. Like it or not, the AI browser feature is now available in nearly every region around the world, with the rather large exception of Europe.

TECCI: Tricky Edits of Collected and Curated Images

arXiv:2606.01213v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite tremendous recent progress, current text-guided image editing methods still struggle with many aspects of editing involving instruction following, minimally editing the source image, and ensuring high visual quality. These problems are especially apparent when the requested edit is challenging, such as those that involve position, motion, viewpoint, scale and creative edits. To systematically test generative image editors, we propose a...

Avian Visitors

Avian Visitors I was initally planning on leaving this as a ‘true’ personal project of sorts. I love a good project writeup of course, but frankly I thought this was too quick an afternoon project to warrant any more documentation than a tweet. Twitter thought otherwise … i mounted a tiny microphone on my apartment balcony to listen for any birds passing by and built a site to collage them as they're heard pic.twitter.com/85KrLRL5tu —