The AI Wire ●

Microsoft and Alphabet both reported September-quarter earnings on Wednesday, October 28. Microsoft posted revenue of $92.3 billion, up 19%, and for the first time disclosed Azure's revenue in dollars: $33.2 billion, up 48% year over year and ahead of the roughly $32.3 billion analysts expected, making Azure its largest product line.

Alphabet reported revenue of $127.6 billion, up 25%, with Google Cloud roughly doubling to $30.7 billion — just behind Azure in dollars, but growing about twice as fast. The market split the two: Microsoft rose after hours, while Alphabet fell roughly 7% after Search and YouTube advertising revenue missed estimates and an $8.7 billion loss on equity securities cut into earnings.

The AI buildout's cost showed up in cash flow. Microsoft's capital spending totaled $45.2 billion in the quarter including finance leases, with free cash flow still positive at $18.6 billion, while Alphabet's free cash flow was negative $9.1 billion as its spending surged.

Google has introduced Immersive Explorations in the Gemini app, a feature that lets students explore topics from microscopic systems to deep space through interactive scenes. The experiences are aimed at science and history topics that are hard to picture from text alone.

Students can open the library from the Gemini student hub by choosing "Try immersive explorations," and Google says the experiences will also be accessible directly inside Gemini chat conversations soon. Audio narration to guide users through the scenes is also on the way.

Immersive Explorations is available in English, Indonesian, Hindi, Brazilian Portuguese, French and Simplified Chinese. Google announced the feature in a blog post on Wednesday, October 28.

Google DeepMind announced Gemini 4 Carbon on Wednesday, October 28, calling it its strongest model yet, with state-of-the-art cybersecurity and long-horizon capabilities. It arrives just two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon, and Google says it ranks first on Artificial Analysis's Intelligence Index v5.0 with a score of 59, a point ahead of Claude Opus 5.5.

Cybersecurity is the headline: Google reports 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities, 54.8% on ExploitGym and 71.0% on CWE-bench for patching, run without guardrails. It also says Carbon more than doubles Argon's success rate at generating secure code. Those security figures are Google's own, not independently reproduced.

Access starts narrow. A subset of cyber defenders gets Carbon this week through Google's Fairwind Program, then more trusted partners, while Google takes part in the US government's voluntary pre-release testing process. Wider access for developers, businesses and consumers is promised as soon as possible, with no date; introductory pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, rising to $4 and $20 later.

Google said on Wednesday, October 28 that Chrome's enhanced autofill can now suggest details pulled directly from a user's Gmail while they fill out online forms. The suggestions can include order numbers, package tracking information, flight bookings and hotel reservations, surfaced under a 'Suggested by Gemini' section.

The feature is powered by Gemini with Personal Intelligence and is opt-in: it is rolling out in the US to Gemini in Chrome users who have Personal Intelligence enabled, on desktop, Android and iOS. Google says sensitive data stays encrypted, and users can remove suggestions or turn the feature off in Chrome settings.

It builds on last year's autofill upgrade, which could fill in details such as passport numbers and addresses from a Google Account and Google Wallet. Google says Google Photos is next, with autofill soon able to pull information from images stored in a user's Photos library.

Google announced on October 28 that it is scaling ads in AI Mode, its conversational AI search experience, to 10 new countries: Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore. It plans to expand to Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom in the fourth quarter of 2026, and in the United States it is launching multiturn ads, so advertising can appear in follow-up queries, not just the first answer.

The ads will be clearly labelled "Sponsored." Google says queries in AI Mode are on average three times longer than traditional searches, that its research shows people are comfortable with ads in AI Mode and find them highly relevant, and that click-through rates are already similar between sponsored and organic product listings.

The announcement came on Alphabet's third-quarter earnings call, as growth in its core Search advertising business slowed to 12% year over year, down from 19% in the first quarter and 17% in the second, even as total revenue rose 25% to $127.6 billion. "This includes taking our monetization footprint global for the first time," chief business officer Philipp Schindler told investors.

In a 24-hour comparison published Tuesday, October 27, WIRED's Reece Rogers set up six always-on AI agents on his iPhone — OpenAI's Dots, Anthropic's Claude Duet, Meta's Muse, Google's Gemini Spark, xAI's Grok Bot and Instinct — and gave them five everyday tasks scored from 1 to 5. Only Dots and Claude Duet warned him about a deliberately planted scheduling conflict; the other four missed the overlap before it happened.

Rogers connected his personal Gmail and Google Calendar rather than his whole digital life, and judged the agents on initiative, instruction-following and browser use. The entry costs differed widely in his comparison: Dots at $100 a month, Grok Bot at $30, and Gemini Spark and Claude Duet at $20 each, with Muse free and Instinct invite-only.

The test is a useful early snapshot of the agent race the big labs are now running in public: having access to an inbox and a calendar, it turns out, does not guarantee an agent will connect the dots between them.

Google DeepMind announced Genie 4 on Tuesday, October 27, opening its newest world model as a restricted research preview for trusted testers. Genie 4 generates interactive simulated environments in real time and adds native audio — music, ambient noise and dialogue produced by the model itself alongside the world.

Users can steer a running simulation with natural-language prompts, changing the weather, adding objects or moving the camera mid-session, and Gemini models help guide the simulation and keep it coherent. Runs last about two minutes, roughly double Genie 3's limit. DeepMind frames the work as a step toward AGI and as a source of training environments for robots and agents.

Access is limited for now: DeepMind plans later availability through Project Genie for Google AI Ultra subscribers and through early-access partnerships on the Gemini API and Google AI Studio, and has opened a waiting list rather than a public release. Its documentation is candid about the limits — scenes drift over time, generated text is often illegible, and real-world locations are not simulated perfectly. Generated video and sound carry SynthID watermarks.

Google announced on October 27 that it is making Gemini Robotics ER 2, an AI model that supports robots' situational judgment and task planning, available as a public preview on Google Cloud. The model was first announced on July 30 and made available through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio, but had remained a limited preview on the enterprise-focused Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.

ER 2 is a higher-level model that understands its surroundings from images, video and other inputs and decides how to proceed with a task. Concrete control, such as driving a robot's motors, is handled by the connected control system or by a separate AI model, so the announcement does not mean a cloud model can now run robots autonomously on its own.

With the expansion, enterprises can test an AI that handles a robot's task decisions while combining it with Google Cloud authentication and permission management. Google also describes ER 2 classifying task progress, locating the video frame where a critical event happened, and self-correcting after a failed step instead of restarting the whole task.

Google updated its Android Bench leaderboard on Monday, October 26, adding the reasoning level used for each model and new results for GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6.1 Sol, Claude Sonnet 5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5, and Google's own Gemini 4 Argon. Android Bench is Google's own test of how well models handle Android-specific coding tasks and best practices, and the list now also shows average cost.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 tops the chart with a 40% pass rate and an 80.9% completion rate, with Claude Opus 5.5 second. GPT-6.1 Sol posts a 29.3% pass rate and an 82.8% completion rate at a listed cost of $99.50, against $1,574.90 for Sonnet 5.5's first-place run.

The awkward result is Google's own: Gemini 4 Argon debuts in fifth place at a 21.3% pass rate, an 81.8% completion rate and an average cost of $267.70, behind Claude Fable 5.1 as well. Google stood by Argon's broader capabilities, but its own list is now a public scoreboard on which Anthropic's mid-tier model, not Google's flagship, is the Android-coding pick.

Read together, Anthropic's public S-1 puts its infrastructure commitments at as much as about $807 billion over the next several years, according to MarketWatch's tally of the filing. The largest single arrangement is not a cloud contract at all: five-year master equipment leases with Broadcom worth $161.2 billion, for hardware deployed in dedicated data centers operated by others, cancellable only on default.

The cloud and compute deals follow: at least $114.5 billion to Google through July 2033, at least $110 billion to Amazon through April 2036, at least $44.9 billion to Microsoft through May 2033, $44.6 billion with Nscale, $41.3 billion with Lambda and at least $20 billion with AMD, plus a further $125 billion to $150 billion planned for TPU capacity from providers other than Google itself. PPC Land's separate sum puts the minimum commitments to Google Cloud, Amazon and Microsoft alone at $269.4 billion.

The splashiest revision is SpaceXAI: Anthropic agreed to spend up to $120.5 billion with Elon Musk's company for Nvidia-GPU compute through 2029, about $36 billion more than the $84.5 billion figure reported from the confidential draft. Once all capacity is delivered, expected by the end of this year, that is about $3.1 billion a month; after initial periods ending in early 2027, either side can cancel on 90 days' notice.

Google released Gemini Notebook as a Connected App in the Gemini app on Friday, deepening an integration that previously lived in the app's side panel. Typing @Gemini Notebook in a chat lets users manage and query their notebooks in natural language, and Gemini can also detect on its own when a prompt calls for it.

From inside a chat, users can create, edit or delete a notebook, add, update or delete sources, list notebooks and their sources, save a chat into a notebook, and ask questions answered from a notebook's contents. The feature is on by default for users globally, except in the European Economic Area, where it is off by default.

It is available to all Google Workspace customers, Workspace Individual subscribers and users with personal Google accounts. Admins control it through the Gemini and Gemini Notebook access settings for their organization.

Google and distributed-energy platform Voltus announced an expanded agreement on Thursday to build a 1-gigawatt virtual power plant in the PJM grid region, which serves 67 million people across 13 states and Washington, D.C. The deal adds 1,070 megawatts of flexible capacity to the 100-megawatt agreement the two companies signed in June, and the companies call it one of the largest distributed capacity portfolios deployed by a hyperscaler to date.

A virtual power plant aggregates capacity that already exists at homes and businesses — batteries, smart thermostats, cooling systems and industrial processes. When the grid is under strain, Voltus signals participating sites to reduce or shift their energy use, and participants receive bill savings and direct payments in return. Google funds the capacity as a way of bringing new supply to the grids its data centers draw from.

The announcement leans on a Brattle Group estimate that better grid utilization could save U.S. consumers more than $100 billion over the next decade. 'Expanding our initial commitment tenfold demonstrates our core effort to actively bring our own capacity to the grids that serve us,' said Ellen Zuckerman, Google's head of energy market development for the Americas. Voltus, which raised $225 million earlier this month and targets 20 GW of capacity by 2030, said the deal translates data center growth into direct economic benefits for homes and businesses.

Personal Intelligence in the Gemini app is expanding its Google Maps integration. Alongside the existing Search services connection, Gemini can now reference your Maps searches and saved places, and combine them with Calendar access to give tailored recommendations for your day.

Google's own example: ask which restaurant from a saved list is best after today's meetings, and Gemini checks where the last meeting is and finds saved locations near it. Personal Intelligence can be enabled from Gemini's personalization settings, and the expansion follows this week's rollout of the same feature into Android Auto.

Separately, following the launch of Gemini 4 Argon, Google is notifying AI Ultra subscribers that the new model will 'replace Deep Think soon,' suggesting they switch to Argon for deeper reasoning. The brief in-app notice does not make clear whether Deep Think — currently a thinking level on Gemini 3.1 Pro — is going away because that model is being retired, or only the mode is being phased out.

Google Cloud unveiled Agent Compute Engine on Thursday at the AGNTCon and MCPCon events. It is a compute service built specifically for running AI agents at scale, with each workload inside a hardware-isolated microVM that gets its own dedicated guest kernel and root access.

The isolation is the point: agents run code, call tools, and touch data on behalf of users, so Google is leaning on its Titanium IPU technology for added protection. The service is tuned for fast churn — agents can start quickly, pause, and resume later.

Its density trick is copy-on-write memory sharing: agents starting from the same base share memory until one changes something, which Google says has delivered benchmarks of 10 times the density on the same hardware. Google frames the service as part of its Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, with security and governance for agents at the center.

Goldman Sachs announced on Thursday a $500 million commitment to expand its 10,000 Small Businesses program, headlined by a new Goldman Sachs Small Business AI Institute. The institute is partnering with Anthropic, Google, Meta and OpenAI to give entrepreneurs training and tools to integrate AI into their operations.

The institute will work on three fronts: delivering AI education to small-business owners across the country, publishing research on AI use by small businesses, and supporting AI-enabled expansions of access to capital. The wider commitment aims to deliver education, capital access and support services to another 10,000 businesses.

Nearly 20,000 entrepreneurs across all 50 states and four US territories have completed the program since it launched in 2010. 'Every major technology shift has rewarded the businesses that adapt most quickly,' CEO David Solomon said. 'This commitment makes sure the entrepreneurs who are creating America's jobs can lead in the AI economy.'