Google Research published the first large-scale real-world study in Nature Cities, redirecting under 2% of trips to alternative routes through Google Maps changes across ten US cities for six months. Median target-road speed rose around 2% and median fuel consumption rates fell 0.5–1.0%, potentially saving thousands of tonnes of CO2e per city annually.
At Build 2026, Microsoft announced Foundry Managed Compute and a Hugging Face model collection, with weekly updates to open-weight models and one-click deployment to Foundry's managed GPU platform.
As inference costs fell from around $30 per million tokens for GPT-4-class models in early 2023 to under $1 today, and below $0.10 at some providers, UC Berkeley's Aditya G. Parameswaran and colleagues proposed three directions for data systems in the agent era: For Agents, Of Agents and By Agents.
Hugging Face released LeRobot v0.6.0, introducing world model policies VLA-JEPA, FastWAM and LingBot-VA, new VLAs GR00T N1.7, MolmoAct2, EO-1, EVO1 and Multitask DiT, and a unified reward model API with Robometer and TOPReward for the robotics learning loop.
Hugging Face and SkyPilot released an integration allowing a Hugging Face Bucket or any model, dataset or Space repository to be mounted into SkyPilot tasks with an hf:// URL and an existing HF_TOKEN, running across more than 20 clouds, Kubernetes, Slurm and local environments.
Hugging Face's fourth PRX instalment details its data strategy: mixing public and internal pretraining datasets, regenerating long image captions with a VLM and converting them for streaming training. It uses Lance for construction and filtering and MDS for streaming. After switching to Qwen3-VL, text latents are computed during training, with measured throughput loss of around 3–4%, or roughly one extra day for 30 days of training.
Hugging Face introduced a new kernel repository type for Kernels, along with trusted publishers and code signing. By default, only trusted publishers' kernels load; other sources require explicit trust_remote_code=True.
Google DeepMind and A24 announced their first research-focused partnership, with long-term R&D across multiple projects and artists helping shape technologies and workflows. Google also invested in A24. Initial work will bridge frontier technology and next-generation entertainment, with specific goals and technical outputs evolving over time.
Mistral released Leanstral 1.5 under Apache-2.0, with 119B total and 6B active parameters and major formal verification improvements. It achieves 100% on miniF2F, solves 587 of 672 PutnamBench problems, and sets current best results of 87% on FATE-H and 34% on FATE-X.
Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) announced its 2026 PhD graduates, whose work covers robotics, LLM reasoning, computer vision, generative models, AI safety and AI for Science. Destinations include OpenAI, Mistral AI, Physical Intelligence and Amazon, faculty positions at UCLA and the University of Chicago, and start-ups.
Hugging Face and Cerebras jointly demonstrated a real-time speech-to-speech pipeline, accelerating Gemma 4 31B inference with Cerebras and combining Nvidia Parakeet speech recognition with Alibaba Qwen3TTS synthesis.
Hugging Face released ScarfBench (Self-Contained Application Refactoring Benchmark) to evaluate AI agents migrating enterprise Java applications between Spring, Jakarta EE and Quarkus.
Google Research expanded building-level roof reflectivity (albedo) data from 14 cities in 2024 to over 50 cities in nine countries, accessible through the new Heat Resilience Earth Engine App.
Google DeepMind released Nano Banana 2 Lite (gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image) and Gemini Omni Flash (gemini-omni-flash-preview).
Dharma AI discusses Goldfeder, Wyder, LeCun and Shwartz-Ziv's 2026 paper AI Must Embrace Specialization via Superhuman Adaptable Intelligence.
Google Research released TabFM for tabular classification and regression. It reframes table prediction as in-context learning, producing predictions in one forward pass without manual training, hyperparameter tuning or feature engineering.
Every Eval Ever (EEE) and Hugging Face Community Evals are now interoperable, allowing cross-publication of evaluations with links to complete records. EEE stores around 229,000 results across more than 22,000 models and 2,200 benchmarks from 31 reporting formats.
Hugging Face proposed DiScoFormer (Density and Score Transformer), estimating a distribution's density and score simultaneously in one forward pass from a set of data points, without retraining for new distributions.
Google Research published an architecture attaching multi-token prediction (MTP) heads to frozen Gemini Nano v3 models, accelerating on-device inference without changing backbone weights. It has shipped with the Pixel 9 and 10 series.
Google Research proposed linear elastic caching, modelling page eviction as a ski-rental problem and using shallow decision trees to predict page TTLs, dynamically resizing caches to minimise total ownership cost. After months in Spanner production, memory fell 15.5%, cache misses rose only 5.5%, TCO dropped around 5% and actual I/O cost impact was just 0.5%. It was also validated on several public cache traces.
A Google Research paper at COLM 2026 finds reasoning traces unlock factual knowledge LLMs otherwise cannot recall, even for simple single-hop questions. Tests on Gemini-2.5 Flash and Pro and Qwen3-32B identify two mechanisms: extra tokens act as a 'computation buffer', and 'factual priming' produces related facts to semantically prepare the correct answer. Self-generated intermediate facts can also introduce hallucination risks.
Google DeepMind integrated computer use as a built-in tool in Gemini 3.5 Flash. Previously, it was available only as the standalone Gemini 2.5 computer use model.
Mistral AI added new Connectors capabilities. Admin controls for workspace- or organisation-level access and individual tool toggles are generally available, as are API keys scoped to connectors.
Mistral released OCR 4, returning bounding boxes, block-type classifications and per-page and per-word confidence alongside text extraction. It supports 170 languages and single-container self-hosting. Independent annotators preferred OCR 4 on average 72% of the time in blind evaluations of over 600 documents. It scored 85.20 on OlmOCRBench and 93.07 on OmniDocBench, though Mistral warns both benchmarks have known scoring limitations.
Google DeepMind announced work with the UK government, Google Cloud, Faculty and planning departments in Barnet, Camden and Dorset on an AI planning-approval prototype, aiming to help officers reduce householder application processing time by 50%.
Google Research released vector data converting Farmscapes 2020 high-resolution raster maps into usable inventories of hedgerows, stone walls and coppices across over 130,000 square kilometres of the UK. The framework fine-tunes an RSF Vision-Transformer pretrained on over 300 million global satellite images with around 247 square kilometres of labelled data. Polsby–Popper compactness distinguishes woodland, clusters of trees and hedgerows, with a threshold below 0.5 for linear features.
Google DeepMind released AI Control Roadmap, a framework for building and managing advanced AI deployed inside Google. It applies defence in depth, adding system-level safety layers beyond model alignment to provide protection even when alignment is imperfect.
Google published two studies on AI-assisted understanding of skin problems. In a survey of 2,345 participants, over 62% using AI tried to name a skin condition versus 41% in the control group, with 23% accuracy, nearly triple the control group's 8%. A mixed-methods study examined how people use these tools for their own skin concerns, their understanding and differences in doctor communication. AI offered limited help in deciding the next steps for seeking care.
With Google's support, UC San Diego plans a data centre using motherboards from 2,000 retired Pixel phones to provide low-cost, low-carbon cloud computing for hundreds of students and faculty. SPEC benchmarks show 25–50 phones roughly equal one modern server. Phones form Kubernetes-managed clusters of 25–50 devices, with launch expected in autumn 2026.
At AISTATS 2026, Google Research proposed Regularized f-Divergence Kernel Tests for machine unlearning audits, using relative distances to determine whether models are closer to safely retrained versions or original compromised models.
Google DeepMind released experimental open-source model DiffusionGemma, generating text blocks in parallel through text diffusion and achieving up to 4 times faster inference on dedicated GPUs.
Google DeepMind, Schmidt Sciences, Cooperative AI Foundation and ARIA, supported by Google.org, launched up to $10 million in global technical research funding focused on collective behaviour and safety risks in large-scale multi-agent AI systems.
Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.5 Live Translate, a near-real-time speech-to-speech translation model supporting more than 70 languages, with automatic language detection and preservation of speakers' intonation, rhythm and pitch.
Google DeepMind released Gemma 4 12B, a multimodal model for local laptop use between the edge-focused E4B and 26B MoE. Its unified encoder-free architecture feeds visual and audio inputs directly into the LLM backbone.
Google DeepMind launched a three-month Robotics accelerator for 15 early-stage European robotics start-ups, providing technical guidance and access to its AI stack and Gemini robotics models. Covering logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, climate and navigation, it starts in London this week.
Google DeepMind published results from a preregistered randomised controlled trial in Sierra Leone. Over eight weeks, students using Guided Learning improved maths scores by 0.258 standard deviations over controls, equivalent to around 1.2–1.7 years of conventional progress.
Google launched a public preview of Agentic RAG-powered cross-corpus retrieval on Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. Roles including Orchestrator, Planner, Query Rewriter, Search Fanout and Sufficient Context Agent collaborate on multi-source, multi-hop queries.
Google Research published a study in Nature introducing PHRM, which records video with a phone’s front camera in the seconds after face unlock and uses deep learning to estimate heart rate and resting heart rate in the background.
Google Research open-sourced its hydrological modelling framework on GitHub under Apache 2.0, enabling national weather and hydrology agencies to integrate AI flood forecasting. The Python package uses PyTorch and an LSTM architecture, can train or fine-tune on Caravan data, and includes interactive tutorial notebooks and videos.
Google Research unveiled the experimental Gemini for Science toolkit at I/O 2026, including Computational Discovery based on ERA and AlphaEvolve, Hypothesis Generation based on Co-Scientist and Literature Insights based on NotebookLM.