The Weekly AI Roundup: Firebase Studio, Microsoft Gaming AI Trains On Quake II, Robot Combat Coming!

Gemini Live gives your AI eyes to see. The Corleo robot Horse gets everyone dreaming. Microsoft’s gaming platform levels up. ChatGPT will no longer forget about you. Google’s Firebase Studio looks to take on the likes of Cursor and Replit, Higgs Field gets an explosive update, and robot combat is set to become a new sport next month. All this and more in this week’s AI Roundup. Google’s Gemini Live is rolling out to some of the latest Android devices like Pixel 9 and the Galaxy S25. Or if you have a Gemini Pro subscription, Gemini Live allows the AI assistant to see the world around you as the camera from your Device becomes the AI’s vision. This allows users to ask Gemini for immediate feedback on what it is seeing. At the weekend, Meta launched the Llama 4 series with three new Scout, Maverick and Behemoth. The Llama 4 Scout model features a 10 million context window and Maverick has 1 million There were some amazing performance claims and some excellent benchmark results, but some users thought that something was a little off. Allegations have appeared claiming that Meta was deliberately manipulating its benchmark data to make the model appear better than it actually is. In a leaked memo, Shopify CEO Toby Luetke has issued a mandate insisting that AI is integrated at every level and by every person in the company. The memo emphasises that before requesting additional headcount or resources, teams must demonstrate why AI cannot fulfil their needs. Kawasaki has unveiled its new concept Corleo, a four legged robot that you can actually ride kind of like a robot horse. Are we really going full circle in human transportation with us all returning to the horse? Google launched AI Mode as a Google Labs experiment around a month ago and today they announced that it’s rolling out to even more US users. AI mode allows the user to choose to move into an interface that is a hybrid of search and AI output. Google has also added new multimodal understanding, so you can take a photo or upload an image, ask a question about it and get a rich, comprehensive response with links to dive deeper. Microsoft has made some major advances with its Muse AI gaming platform and specifically with their World and Human Action model, or WHAM. WHAM has received several enhancements. This latest version of the model has been training on Quake 2 with only seven days of training data compared to the seven years that the previous model required. There were some major announcements from Google at the Cloud Next conference, kicking off with the launch of their seventh generation Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, named Ironwood. Built for intense AI workloads, Ironwood is the successor to Trillion and beats it on every benchmark. Google also introduced the Agent to agent or A2A protocol, an open source framework aimed at enhancing AI agent communication across various platforms. Perhaps the announcement that has received most attention was Firebase Studio, a new cloud based development environment that uses AI to help develop full stack applications. This platform integrates features from multiple existing tools, allowing developers to prototype, build and deploy applications using natural language prompts. As Elon Musk was live streaming Path of Exile 2 on Starlink, he casually revealed the Grok roadmap for 2025. He said that Grok 3.5 would be soonish and would have some major upgrades and then Grok 4 would be coming out later this year. OpenAI has announced the moonshine memory feature which will allow ChatGPT to reference all the previous chats that the user has had. This should lead to far more personalised responses and Sam Altman noted this as an important step toward AI systems that are deeply integrated into users lives. Freepik announced that they have added a new video editor into their AI suite and Pika Labs has introduced Pika Twists, a new feature that lets users manipulate specific characters or objects in videos while keeping the rest of the footage unchanged. Unitree Robotics has announced a groundbreaking event where their humanoid Robot, the Unitree G1, will participate in live streamed robot boxing matches. NotebookLM has unveiled a new option called Discover Sources. Up until now you would have to manually upload sources for your projects to give the notebook the learning material, but now that process can be automated. When you tap the Discover button, your notebook will scour the web for relevant sources and return you a list of 10 of the best. Earlier this week, Zipline announced it is officially launching in Dallas. Zipline is a delivery company that delivers goods straight to your door using a fascinating combination of a large drone with a delivery pod attached by a wire. Zipline’s P2 drones are capable of carrying up to 8 pounds over a 10 mile radius and they claim to have dinner plate level accuracy.