I’m enjoying the cultural references in all episode titles of Rick and Morty season 9, but this week’s, Mortgully: The Last Rickforest, sounds like a complete enigma.

All we have to go on is one short line: “Rick and Morty gotta evolve, broh.” Take into account eight and a half seasons of absolute chaos, and this could literally mean anything.

OPINION Bosses say working from the office is all about productivity, but the truth is it’s just a power trip driven by fear and narcissism.

Executives who insist on people working from the office like to say it’s all about productivity, culture, collaboration, and mentoring. Pull the other one; it has bells on.

When executives demand that we “return to the office,” they usually lean on a familiar set of talking points: remote work hurts productivity, people collaborate better in the office, and corporate culture only happens in the office. If you look closer, you’ll see it’s all malarkey.

Recent research by Professor Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and two of his grad students found that one reason some bosses resist remote work may be a desire to preserve authority and status. Or, as the paper title so neatly puts it, “Worship me at the office altar: Why narcissistic leaders resist remote work.”

Over the decades, I’ve met and covered many top leaders, especially in tech, and I’ve found that all too many of them have narcissistic tendencies.

Now, thanks to this study, I see this isn’t just my experience. The paper is based on three studies that included Fortune 500 leaders. The researchers found: “Because in-person work offers richer channels for controlling and commanding reverence from employees, in their pursuit of authority and admiration, narcissists are likely to resist remote work.”

These managers argue that spontaneous hallway chats, whiteboard sessions, and faster decision cycles require colocation, especially for teams used to in‑person workflows. They insist that company culture only happens in the office and that loyalty, engagement, and shared identity are impossible to sustain remotely.

They also frequently say juniors cannot be effectively trained without being in the office near seniors to absorb knowledge and norms. In my experience, leaders who teach are vanishingly rare. 

Companies talk a good game. The reality is something else. According to Gallup’s latest American Job Quality Study, only 28 percent of workers get any mentoring. Even if you consider that a somewhat successful number, a closer look reveals that much of this mentoring consisted of a few early meetings, followed by the mentor putting off the junior employee as “real work” got in the way. Mentoring is a good idea, but without follow-through, it’s a waste of time.

The main reason self-absorbed bosses like to give is that remote work is less productive. For instance, Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s CEO, has long argued that remote work does not work well for people who want to “hustle” and advance. David Solomon, Goldman Sachs’ CEO, famously called remote work an “aberration” that the firm would “correct as quickly as possible.” 

You’ll find this attitude in tech companies as well. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, for example, said in 2024 that Google was losing the AI race because “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning. And the reason startups work is that people work like hell. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but the fact of the matter is… you’re not going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete against the other startups.”

Schmidt later rowed back on that opinion, admitting his “error” amid something of a backlash. 

I am so sick of that “startup” BS. Google, AWS, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, and all the rest that like to say they’re rebuilding a startup work-from-the-office culture, are full of crap. Multiple billion-dollar companies are promising today’s workers a shot at making millions from an IPO. They’re working for a paycheck. Oh, and today, Google looks to be just fine in the AI race.

Ego-driven management also relies on the old factory mentality that holds that the best workers are the ones who arrive early, work late, and are seen hustling by the bosses. Putting in 80-hour workweeks may be necessary at a startup, but in most businesses, that’s as stupid as measuring programmers’ productivity by lines of code or, more recently, by how many AI tokens they use.

The simple truth is that, except for cherry-picked studies, such as the WFH Research’s report, which found that fully remote work is associated with roughly 10 to 20 percent lower productivity, most studies find that people who work from home are happier and tend to be as productive, if not more so, than those stuck in the office. 

Staff forced to work from the office don’t even make their employers more profitable. 

The bottom line is that many people love working from home – I’m one of them – and bosses who insist you must work from the office tend to be narcissistic jerks.

If you have bosses like that and you’re a worker bee, I encourage you to look for another, more remote-friendly employer. If you’re in charge of a company and you have middle managers like that, I encourage you to look to AI to replace them.

Yeah, I said it. These days, another reason such managers may want to keep people under their thumb is they know that while AI can’t replace good managers, most managers can be dumped. Many of them are scared to death that someone will realize they’re just messengers and meeting‑makers who contribute nothing to the company’s bottom line. Worse still, from where they sit, they fear, with reason, that AI-driven services such as Jira, Asana AI, and ServiceNow can replace them in a heartbeat. 

I think that’s a fine fate for narcissistic bosses. Fire them all and let unemployment sort them out!  ®

Apple chief executive Tim Cook and the European Union’s technology chief spoke by video call on Monday, and both sides came away describing the exchange as “constructive”. That word is doing a lot of work.

Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen, who oversees the bloc’s digital rulebook, held the meeting with Cook on 30 June. An EU spokesperson said the two had a “constructive exchange on topics of common interest, on which the work continues”.

Neither side detailed what was agreed, and the language suggests very little was.

The subject that brought them to the same screen is Siri AI, Apple’s rebuilt voice assistant, and whether it can launch in Europe without breaching the Digital Markets Act. Apple has already confirmed the feature will not ship on iPhone or iPad in the EU when iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 arrive later this year.

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That decision, first reported in June, left European users without the assistant on the two devices they use most.

Apple frames the delay as the Commission’s doing. It says regulators rejected every proposal it put forward over several months to bring Siri AI to Europe while safely supporting rival assistants.

The Commission tells the story differently, arguing Apple has been unable to build interoperability that meets the bloc’s privacy and security standards.

Both framings can be true at once, which is part of why the deadlock has proved so hard to break.

At the heart of the dispute is how far the DMA’s interoperability rules reach. Apple argues the Commission’s reading would force it to hand any third-party assistant the same deep access Siri AI enjoys, including the ability to read and send messages, make purchases, and act across installed apps.

The company says stripping out those permissions for rivals would leave users exposed, and that the Commission has not accepted its safeguards. Brussels sees that access as exactly the point of a law designed to prise open gatekeeper platforms.

The restriction applies only to iOS and iPadOS, the two systems the DMA has formally designated. EU users will still get Siri AI on macOS 27, visionOS 27, and watchOS 27. Monday’s call did not change that.

Apple has not committed to a timeline for bringing the assistant to European iPhones, and the Commission has not signalled any softening of its position. The meeting, on the public record at least, produced an agreement to keep talking.

The timing carries its own weight. Cook is preparing to step down as Apple’s chief executive, with hardware boss John Ternus expected to take over, and much of Cook’s remaining value to the company has centred on his role as its senior government liaison.

A cordial sign-off with Brussels fits that brief. The dispute also arrives as the Commission tightens its grip more broadly, having moved to force Google to open Android to rival assistants under the same law. Apple is not being singled out, even if it feels that way in Cupertino.

The wider relationship is anything but warm. The Commission has fined Apple €500m over App Store steering rules, and the company remains under scrutiny across several DMA workstreams.

Against that backdrop, a single video call reads less as a breakthrough than as both sides keeping a difficult channel open.

What Monday did not deliver was any substance a European iPhone owner could use. Siri AI remains unavailable on the devices most people in the bloc actually carry, and the two parties have committed only to further conversation.

Whether the next round produces more than an adjective remains to be seen. For now, the assistant stays on the far side of a regulatory line neither Apple nor Brussels seems ready to redraw, and the “constructive” label sits over a standoff that has not moved.

Upon completion of the deal, the French energy services giant will combine Cognite with its own industrial software business, Aveva.

Schneider Electric has agreed to acquire industrial data and AI software company Cognite in an all-cash transaction worth $3.1bn.

Upon completion of the deal – which will see Schneider acquire 100pc of Cognite’s share capital – the French energy services giant will combine Cognite with its own industrial software business, Aveva.

Specifically, Schneider plans to integrate Cognite’s capabilities into Connect, Aveva’s cloud-based industrial intelligence platform, which uses a suite of shared software services to “achieve rapid and reliable integration” of industrial data, models, applications, and AI and analytics.

Cognite, founded in 2016 by Geir Engdahl, John Markus Lervik and Stein Danielsen, specialises in industrial software to improve production efficiency in areas such as energy and process manufacturing, among others. Last year, the company’s annual revenue exceeded $170m.

Originally headquartered in Oslo, Norway, Cognite – which currently employs more than 800 people globally – moved its HQ to Arizona in the US in 2025.

“Cognite has built something rare, a truly industrial-grade AI platform that turns the complexity of operational data into a competitive advantage,” said Schneider Electric CEO Olivier Blum.

“By bringing Cognite into Schneider Electric and AVEVA, we unite the world’s most comprehensive energy management and automation infrastructure with the software and AI capabilities to make it natively intelligent.”

The acquisition is expected to be completed “in the coming quarters”, according to Cognite, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.

Schneider’s acquisition of Cognite comes amid an increased focus on industrial AI in Europe.

In April, Siemens CEO Roland Busch and German chancellor Friedrich Merz both called for eased EU regulations on industrial AI.

In a speech at the Hannover Messe trade fair, Merz warned that if Europe is to boost productivity, industrial AI will need more regulatory freedom than, for example, consumer AI.

“I will ​push to ease the regulatory burden ⁠in the EU on AI and, ​where possible, to exempt industrial AI ​from the current regulatory straitjacket that is too tight for AI within the European Union,” he said at the time.

Meanwhile, Busch warned in an interview at the event that Siemens would prioritise investments in the US and China if the EU did not lighten its regulations in a field he said is already subject to sector-specific regulations.

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⁠⁠This couple couldn’t find good Greek yoghurt in S’pore, so they built a factory from scratch

Most yoghurt consumed in Singapore has travelled thousands of kilometres before it reaches the fridge.

It typically starts at a dairy farm in Europe, Australia, or the United States, before being processed, packaged, shipped across oceans, and stocked on supermarket shelves weeks later.

Singaporean Haanee Tyebally and her American husband and co-founder, Braedan Tegenfeldt, both 36, wanted to change that. The result is Annie’s All Natural, which claims to be Singapore’s first commercial producer of Greek yoghurt and cultured creams, made in a 2,000 sq ft factory in Mandai.

We spoke with Haanee about how she and Braedan—both with backgrounds in international development and no prior experience in food science, dairy, or manufacturing—built the factory from the ground up and a supply chain that now serves some of the country’s most prestigious hotels.

A family recipe

Annie’s story began not in Singapore, but in Yangon, Myanmar, where the couple grew up and built their lives together.

Braedan founded the business in 2014 after spotting a gap in the market. His mother had begun making Greek yoghurt at home after a holiday in Greece, recreating a staple of his American upbringing in Myanmar.

At the time, the country was seeing an influx of returning nationals and expatriates, but good-quality Greek yoghurt was virtually impossible to find. Seeing the opportunity, Braedan decided to turn the family recipe into a business.

Alongside his full-time job, Braedan started producing artisanal Greek yoghurt out of his parents’ garage, made in small batches and entirely by hand. Gradually, the business grew steadily from supplying small luxury hotels such as Belmond’s Governor’s Residence to being stocked at Myanmar’s largest grocery stores.

Haanee, who was working in Myanmar at the time for an NGO focused on family planning and women’s health, wasn’t involved in the business then. However, she later joined as his co-founder when the pair eventually moved to Singapore in 2020.

During the circuit breaker, the couple watched supermarket shelves empty as supply chains strained, and found nothing locally made that matched the quality of the Greek yoghurt they’d been eating and producing in Myanmar.

We didn’t really see anything that was comparable that was available in Singapore—something made either locally or within our region, something high quality, made of really good milk.

Haanee Tyebally

The same gap Braedan had spotted years earlier in Myanmar had emerged again, this time in Singapore.
That convinced the couple to make a bold move: build a production facility from scratch and establish a new life in Singapore.

From July 2021 to early 2023, the couple spent nearly two years building the facility from the ground up. They commissioned custom machinery from Italy, installed cold rooms, fitted out a food-grade processing plant, and ran batch after batch through R&D until they were satisfied with the final product.

The investment came close to six figures—a scale that was far beyond anything they had undertaken in Yangon.

But what makes Annie’s different?

The answer lies in almost every step of its production process.

Firstly, it’s the brand’s flavours. Annie’s sources grass-fed, free-range milk from New Zealand, specifically from a dairy processor powered by geothermal energy—one of the few in the world to run on a renewable energy source.

According to Haanee, sourcing milk from Southeast Asia wasn’t a serious option because the region’s tropical climate isn’t well suited for dairy cows. She also believes grass-fed milk offers a better micronutrient profile while reflecting higher animal welfare standards.

The brand is equally intentional about its flavours. Rather than sticking to the usual fruit varieties, Annie’s offers six options: plain, vanilla bean, passionfruit, ginger, coffee, and its newest flavour, raspberry.

The biggest difference, however, is how the yoghurt is made.

While many products labelled “Greek yoghurt” achieve their thick texture through mechanised straining or added milk proteins and solids, Annie’s follows the traditional method. After the milk is cultured, the yoghurt is transferred into large cloth bags and left to strain naturally for 14 to 16 hours.

According to Haanee, this slow process naturally concentrates the yoghurt’s proteins, fats, and flavour, creating a dense, creamy texture without thickeners, stabilisers, emulsifiers, or other unnecessary additives.

We really want consumers to have the experience of eating a super minimal product that’s made in a way that takes time, effort, intention, and care.

Haanee Tyebally

Building a client base from scratch

When Annie’s officially launched in Singapore in 2023, it had no distribution network, no established connections in Singapore’s F&B industry, and no existing retail relationships. What they had was yoghurt they believed in.

Their first strategy was to target the hospitality sector.

Hotels, they reasoned, consumed large volumes of yoghurt on breakfast buffets, had stringent food safety standards that played to their strengths, and had procurement teams who could evaluate products on merit. Getting through those doors required a lot of cold emails and door-knocking, but it eventually paid off.

Today, Annie’s supplies an impressive roster of properties: Shangri-La on Orange Grove Road, Fullerton Hotel and Fullerton Bay Hotel, Sofitel City Centre, JW Marriott South Beach, W Hotel in Sentosa, and multiple Resorts World properties, including the newly opened Lis Hotel. Hotels and restaurants now account for the bulk of the company’s sales.

Beyond Greek yoghurt, Annie’s also produces sour cream, crème fraîche, and labneh—a lightly salted yoghurt cheese—with culturing times of between 24 and 40 hours to meet the needs of its hospitality and foodservice clients.

On the retail front, Annie’s has been stocked at Little Farms since shortly after launch, a partnership Haanee shared was built on shared values around clean ingredients and transparent sourcing. The brand has also expanded online through RedMart, with each 120g tub retailing for S$4.20.

For now, though, major supermarket chains still remain out of reach.

High listing fees, upfront production costs, and long payment cycles pose significant barriers for a small producer, though Haanee hopes Annie’s will eventually make its way onto mainstream supermarket shelves so more Singaporeans can access its products.

A growing market

Today, Annie’s produces more than 4,000kg of Greek yoghurt each month, processing over 8,000 litres of milk.

Haanee attributes that growth to changing consumer habits. Once a niche product, Greek yoghurt has become increasingly mainstream as social media, greater nutrition awareness, and more well-travelled consumers drive demand for high-protein foods.

She also noted that Greek yoghurt’s naturally lower lactose content than regular yoghurt makes it well-suited to Asian consumers, many of whom are lactose intolerant.

To reach more customers, Annie’s has been doing pop-ups at various farmers’ markets like City Spouts, AIR restaurant at Dempsey and the Singapore Agro-Food Enterprises Federation over the years.

That said, the team remains small, comprising six full-time and part-time staff, with Haanee and Braedan still directly involved in daily production.

Haanee shared that labour is one of the industry’s most persistent challenges. Finding people willing to do the physical, time-intensive work of food manufacturing in Singapore is increasingly difficult in the F&B sector.

The other running challenge is cost. Producing at a small, artisanal scale with premium ingredients in Singapore means that its price point cannot compete with multinational dairy brands that benefit from industrial-scale economics.

Annie’s yoghurt isn’t cheap, and Haanee doesn’t shy away from that, but she believes that her products provide good value for customers for a high-quality dairy producer.

To reduce costs, Annie’s encourages its corporate clients to participate in its very own glass jar recycling programme. It collects, sterilises, and reuses yoghurt jars for its next batch of production.

In the past year alone, close to 40,000 jars have been recovered and reincorporated into the supply chain rather than going to waste.

In it for the long run

Haanee is cautious about trend dependency.

Greek yoghurt is having a moment between viral social media content, growing protein consciousness, and a more nutritionally savvy consumer, but the goal at Annie’s isn’t to ride the wave. It’s to outlast it.

“I hope that our products build beyond trends and that people actually eat them—one, because they enjoy them, but two, because they are really good for you,” she said.

For a brand that spent close to six figures building a factory here before selling a single jar, that long-term thinking is baked into everything Annie’s does, from its values to the 14-hour strain. It’s a business built around doing things the hard way, because the founders believe the product speaks for itself.

We want to make sure we are doing the best by our customers and making the best product we can and standing by every ingredient we use.

Haanee Tyebally

• Find out more about Annie’s All Natural here.
• Read other articles about Singaporean businesses here.

Also Read: ⁠This 52 Y/O kopi business roasts 1,000kg of coffee every month & is winning over younger drinkers

Featured Image Credit: Annie’s All Natural

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

There’s another World Cup category in today’s Connections: Sports Edition, and some of the other clues are World Cup-related, too. If you’re struggling with the puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is published by The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by The Times. It doesn’t appear in the NYT Games app, but it does in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Where are you sitting?

Green group hint: Soccer (OK, football) group

Blue group hint: Roar!

Purple group hint: Gosling or Reynolds.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Stadium seating sections.

Green group: CONCACAF teams in World Cup.

Blue group: Teams with Lion nicknames.

Purple group: Ryans.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is stadium seating sections. The four answers are bleachers, mezzanine, suite and upper deck.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is CONCACAF teams in World Cup. The four answers are Canada, Curaçao, Mexico and United States.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is teams with Lion nicknames. The four answers are Columbia, Detroit, England and Penn State.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is Ryans. The four answers are Crouser, Day, Fitzpatrick and Poles.

Toughest Connections: Sports Edition categories

The Connections: Sports Edition puzzle can be tough, but it really depends on which sports you know the most about. My husband aces anything having to do with Formula 1, my best friend is a hockey buff, and I can answer any question about Minnesota teams.

That said, it’s hard to pick the toughest Connections categories, but here are some I found exceptionally mind-blowing.

#1: Serie A Clubs. Answers: Atalanta, Juventus, Lazio, Roma.

#2: WNBA MVPs. Answers: Catchings, Delle Donne, Fowles and Stewart.

#3: Premier League team nicknames. Answers: Bees, Cherries, Foxes and Hammers.

#4: Homophones of NBA player names. Answers: Barns, Connect, Heart and Hero.

Easemate.ai launched in 2025 with a simple pitch: one platform for everything AI.

It doesn’t make you choose between a chat assistant, an image generator, or a video tool. You get all three, alongside study utilities, document readers, and image editing features. The range of supported models is equally wide, covering GPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, Grok, Kimi K2, and Qwen 3 on the chat side alone.

Google is upgrading its AI image generation capabilities today with the debut of Nano Banana 2 (NB2) Lite, an optimized model built for rapid execution and tight infrastructure budgets.

Technically designated as Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Image on Google’s application programming interface (API), NB2 Lite is positioned as the fastest and most cost-effective option within Google’s creative model family, capable of generating images in 4 seconds at a flat rate of $0.034 per 1,000 images.

It’s available immediately to enterprise developers through Google AI Studio, the Gemini API, and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (GEAP).

It’s not quite as fast or customizable as startup Krea’s new, partially open licensed Krea 2 Turbo (which allows for open modification and commercial usage by small enterprises), but the big selling point here is the low price and bundling with Google’s larger Workplace and AI offerings.

This release lands alongside the public preview of Gemini Omni Flash, a multimodal conversational video generation and editing model.

However, while Omni Flash represents Google’s long-term bet on agentic video manipulation, Nano Banana 2 Lite is the immediate infrastructure workhorse, tailored specifically for high-throughput commercial application, rapid programmatic prototyping, and automated asset generation workflows.

The technology of speed

At its core, Nano Banana 2 Lite is built directly upon the Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite architecture, engineered to solve the persistent tension between computational latency and operational overhead.

In high-velocity enterprise frameworks, traditional large-scale image models introduce significant friction due to multi-second processing delays and high per-token costs. Google’s new lightweight model circumvents these bottlenecks by generating a standard 1k resolution image in under four seconds.

This represents a stark performance optimization over its legacy predecessor, Nano Banana (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image), achieved through targeted enhancements in core baseline capabilities.

According to internal documentation, the model features upgraded world knowledge for drafting rough data visualizations and contextual layouts, enhanced character consistency to preserve identity across continuous image streams, and localized typographic rendering capabilities.

The trade-offs inherent to this “Lite” designation are transparently outlined in Google’s technical data sheets.

Unlike the broader standard Nano Banana 2 (NB2) and Nano Banana Pro (NB Pro) lines, which support versatile multi-resolution scaling across 1k, 2k, and 4k outputs, Nano Banana 2 Lite restricts its resolution support exclusively to a 1k canvas. Yet, within this specialized operational boundary, the architectural tuning yields surprising competitive efficiencies. In standardized internal benchmarks, Nano Banana 2 Lite achieved a Text to Image arena Elo score of 1251. This score comfortably eclipses the legacy NB1 score of 1151 and remarkably edges out the bulkier, more expensive NB Pro, which sits at 1245 in the same text-to-image track. For specialized editing tasks, the model maintains a single-image editing Elo score of 1308 and a multiple-image editing score of 1294, providing a highly optimized sweet spot for real-time applications.

A boost to rapid prototyping and marketing research

From a product implementation perspective, Google is marketing Nano Banana 2 Lite not as an artistic engine, but as an invisible, high-throughput utility layer for automated workflows. T

he target demographic spans software engineers, programmatic ad platforms, and digital commerce applications where rapid iteration is crucial.

Think real-time A/B testing for thousands of targeted advertising variations or immediate layout adjustments on localized storefronts. Google highlights three specific production environments where the model excels.

First, its world knowledge allows systems to instantly draft accurate contextual scenes or location-specific mockups.

Second, its character consistency handles the rigorous demands of storyboarding tools and digital fashion try-ons, where keeping object fidelity static across sequential generations is historically difficult.

Finally, its text rendering improvements mean legible copy can be embedded directly into rapid ad generations, allowing teams to verify layout compatibility across various languages on the fly.

Developers should note, however, that while native image generation operates with lowest-latency profiles, conditional image editing tasks may experience marginally higher response times due to the secondary processing layers required to rewrite existing pixels.

Licensing and acess

The deployment mechanism of Nano Banana 2 Lite via proprietary APIs underscores an enterprise-first commercial licensing strategy.

Unlike open-weights models that developers can pull down to run locally under open-source frameworks like Apache 2.0 or modified OpenRAIL licenses, Google’s latest models remain tightly integrated into its managed cloud stack.

For enterprises, this eliminates the operational complexity of hosting hardware but binds usage strictly to Google’s metered pricing terms.Financially, this commercial strategy is highly aggressive.

At $0.034 per 1,000 images across both AI Studio and GEAP channels, the model undercuts the older, less capable NB1 model ($0.039) and slashes costs dramatically compared to standard NB2 ($0.067) and NB Pro ($0.134) tiers. Internal notes indicate that the model delivers roughly 60–70% of the general capability of NB2 and NB Pro while executing at significantly higher speeds and a fraction of the cost.

By lowering the fiscal barrier to high-frequency image generation, Google is making a direct play to lock enterprise developers into its commercial platform ecosystem.