A few years ago agricultural equipment giant John Deere found itself on the receiving end of multiple state, federal, and class action lawsuits for its efforts to monopolize tractor repair. The lawsuits noted that the company consistently purchased competing repair centers in order to consolidate the sector and force customers into using the company’s own repair facilities, driving up costs and logistical hurdles dramatically for farmers.
“As we continue to innovate industry leading equipment and technology solutions supported by our world-class dealer network, we are equally committed to providing customers and other service providers with access to repair resources,” said Denver Caldwell, vice president, Aftermarket & Customer Support. “We’re pleased that this resolution allows us to move forward and remain focused on what matters most – serving our customers.”
Except if John Deere had cared about customer service, they wouldn’t be in this predicament.
In addition to intentionally acquiring repair alternatives to monopolize repair and drive up consumer costs, John Deere also routinely makes repair difficult and costly through the act of software locks, obnoxious DRM restrictions, and “parts pairing” — which involves only allowing the installation of company-certified replacement parts — or mandatory collections of company-blessed components.
More recently, the company had been striking meaningless “memorandums of understanding” with key trade groups, pinky swearing to stop their bad behavior if the groups agree to not support state or federal right to repair legislation. Several such groups backed off their criticism, only to have John Deere continue its monopolistic behavior, the FTC’s complaint notes.
The annoyance at John Deere’s behavior has driven a broad, bipartisan movement that’s in very vocal support for state and federal guidelines enshrining “right to repair” protections into law. Unfortunately, while all fifty states have at least flirted with the idea of a state law, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws.
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And among those, not one has taken any substantive action to actually enforce the new law, something that needs to change if the movement is to obtain and retain meaningful policy momentum.
Microsoft has introduced new Windows protections to defend against phishing attacks that abuse Remote Desktop connection (.rdp) files, adding warnings and disabling risky shared resources by default.
RDP files are commonly used in enterprise environments to connect to remote systems because admins can preconfigure them to automatically redirect local resources to the remote host.
Threat actors have increasingly abused this functionality in phishing campaigns. The Russian state-sponsored APT29 hacking group has previously used rogue RDP files to remotely steal data and credentials from victims.
When opened, these files can connect to attacker-controlled systems and redirect local drives to the connected device, allowing the attacker-controlled device to steal files and credentials stored on disk.
They can also capture clipboard data, such as passwords or sensitive text, or redirect authentication mechanisms like smart cards or Windows Hello to impersonate users
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New RDP protections roll out
As part of the April 2026 cumulative updates for Windows 10 (KB5082200) and Windows 11 (KB5083769 and KB5082052), Microsoft has now released new protections to prevent malicious RDP connection files from being used on devices.
“Malicious actors misuse this capability by sending RDP files through phishing emails,” warns Microsoft.
“When a victim opens the file, their device silently connects to a server controlled by the attacker and shares local resources, giving the attacker access to files, credentials, and more.”
After installing this update, when users open an RDP file for the first time, a one-time educational prompt is shown that explains what RDP files are and warns about their risks. Windows users will then be prompted to acknowledge that they understand the risks and press OK, which will prevent the alert from being shown again.
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Educational dialog warning about the risks of RDP files Source: Microsoft
Future attempts to open RDP files will now display a security dialog before any connection is made.
This dialog shows whether the RDP file is signed by a verified publisher, the remote system’s address, and lists all local resource redirections, such as drives, clipboard, or devices, with every option disabled by default.
If a file is not digitally signed, Windows displays a “Caution: Unknown remote connection” warning and labels the publisher as unknown, indicating there is no way to verify who created the file.
Windows warning that an RDP file is from an unverified publisher Source: Microsoft
If the RDP file is digitally signed, Windows will display the publisher, but still warn you to verify their legitimacy before connecting.
It should be noted that these new protections apply only to connections initiated by opening RDP files, not to those made through the Windows Remote Desktop client.
Microsoft says that Administrators can temporarily disable these protections by going to the HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services\Client Registry key and modifying the RedirectionWarningDialogVersion value so it is set to 1.
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However, as RDP files have historically been abused in attacks, it is strongly recommended to keep these protections enabled.
Automated pentesting proves the path exists. BAS proves whether your controls stop it. Most teams run one without the other.
This whitepaper maps six validation surfaces, shows where coverage ends, and provides practitioners with three diagnostic questions for any tool evaluation.
If you have ever typed the same AI prompt into Gemini multiple times across different tabs, you know how tedious that gets. Google has now solved that problem by launching a new feature called Skills in Chrome. It lets you save your most useful Gemini prompts and run them again instantly with a single click.
So what can I do with Skills in Chrome?
Skills can turn your Gemini prompts into reusable one-click tools. Once saved, a Skill stays available across all your desktop devices signed into the same Google account.
Early testers have used them to calculate protein macros from recipe pages, generate side-by-side product spec comparisons across multiple tabs, and scan lengthy documents to summarize information.
Google
Google is also launching a pre-built Skills library with ready-to-use prompts for common tasks. You can use them as-is or customize them to fit your needs. Skills also come with privacy guardrails. Before taking sensitive actions such as sending an email or adding a calendar event, it will ask for your confirmation first.
How to use Skills in Google Chrome
Skills are rolling out to desktop Chrome users with their language set to English-US. To save a Skill, open Gemini in Chrome and type a prompt you want to reuse. Once the conversation is in your chat history, you will see the option to save it directly as a Skill from there.
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Google
To run it, type a forward slash ( / ) in the Gemini chat box and select your saved Skill. You can also use the plus sign ( + ) button to access Skills. To manage or edit them, type forward slash ( / ) and click the compass icon. To browse the pre-built library, look for it inside the same menu.
Apple reportedly threatened Grok owner xAI with an App Store ban if the deepfake nude generation issues weren’t addressed. In spite of ongoing problems with the chatbot, the app was never removed.
X and Grok faced backlash after deepfake problem
For several horrific days in January, social media platform X was flooded with AI-generated pornographic images involving non-consenting adults and minors. Many wondered why legal entities were slow to respond, but above all, why Apple was completely silent on the matter. According to a new report from CNBC, shared by9to5Mac, Apple did threaten to remove Grok from the App Store. While Elon Musk did change moderation rules on X, even after monetizing the illegal porn, the Grok app didn’t change much at all. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums
Washington state’s Legislative Building, which houses the Legislature. (GeekWire Photo / Brent Roraback)
Longtime Seattle investor and entrepreneur Chris DeVore is managing partner of Founders’ Co-op.
I have a confession to make. I’m a Democrat. And a capitalist. Both, at the same time.
This didn’t used to be a position that needed defending. But over the course of my adult life these two ideas have moved farther and farther apart. The bond is now at the breaking point, and if it snaps, the party I grew up in will abdicate its once-legitimate claim to the best of the American idea.
The belief in free markets is actually shared by the vast majority of Americans, and while it may anger the populist fringe, embracing capitalism would be a rallying cry to centrists from both parties who despair for our future and are hungry for a message that makes sense.
Today, the party that has labored to defend and perfect the American experiment — with opportunity, justice and equal treatment under the law for all — has either lost its mind, or its memory, for the motive force that makes those ideals possible.
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Take away the promise of a better life (immigration), the means to achieve it (capitalism), and the certainty that the fruits of your labor won’t be arbitrarily confiscated (rule of law), and the engine that has made America the richest, most powerful and most admired country in the world grinds to a halt, and the whole grand experiment comes to an end.
One can acknowledge all the historical errors that mar the American project — the displacement and murder of indigenous people, slavery and Jim Crow, the creeping capture of government by corporations, rich people, old people, the list goes on — and not lose sight of the three essential ingredients that make our strange and complicated country possible: capitalism, the rule of law, and a welcome embrace of all who wish to make America their home.
But if you listen to Democrats at both the state and national level today, capitalism is the enemy. Billionaires and their current avatars, AI and data centers, have become the bogeymen that electeds and party leaders invoke to stir outrage in the base.
What’s offered as an alternative isn’t economically coherent (“tax the rich,” when the top 10% of earners already pay ~75% of all federal income taxes; “ban data centers,” industrial-scale NIMBYism that simply pushes development elsewhere), but the message behind the slogans is clear: American prosperity is not something to be conserved, much less promoted; it is a natural resource that we somehow lucked into and can harvest at will, an overflowing fountain of wealth that will never run dry.
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How did we get here? How has capitalism, the incontrovertible powerplant of democracy, become anathema to the Democratic party?
Today’s apparent loss of faith is actually rooted in capitalism’s undefeated record of success, coupled with the fitful but now accelerating failure of our democratic machinery.
It’s strange that the centrality of capitalism to our national project requires explanation, but that’s actually the best evidence of its truth: we have been so rich for so long, so embarrassed with our abundance of material and experiential choices, that we have come to take it for granted. We blithely assume that the neighborhood business owners and global corporations that make abundance possible, depositing bi-weekly paychecks in the bank accounts of their millions of workers and filling store shelves with the bewildering array of goods and services we enjoy every day, have simply always been there, will always be there, like the air we breathe.
This is a tragic mistake.
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I have made a career, or more truly, I have found a calling, in supporting entrepreneurs from their moment of inception. Every business that exists, from the most humble corner cafe up to and including General Motors and Amazon, only does so because a small number of unreasonable people overcame extraordinary obstacles over many years to create something from nothing.
Every paying job, every charitable gift, every nickel of tax revenue that finances the safe and convenient world we all enjoy, springs from that improbable act of creation. The machinery of capitalism works so well, allowing one person’s vision to be transformed into millions of jobs and billions of dollars of tax revenue, that we have simply forgotten how extraordinary it is, how dramatic a break it represents from thousands of years of autocracy, feudalism, injustice and inequality.
The engine of capitalism is so efficient that it also conceals the deepest truth of all organic systems: companies, just like people, are born, live a short time, and then decline and die. This is hidden by the irrepressible generative energy of well-regulated self-interest: new companies arise to fill the gaps and address the shortcomings of current incumbents, fueling an endlessly diverse and creative process of regeneration. Every company that falters is replaced by two more, eager to serve the customers no longer satisfied by the prior wave’s lackluster efforts.
To paint a picture of this cycle of renewal, of the top 100 most valuable companies in America today, 15 were founded in just the past 10 years, 30 didn’t exist 25 years ago, 45 didn’t exist 50 years ago, and less than a third (30 of 100) have been around for 100 years or more. Great companies can seem like they’ve always been here, but in fact they are dying and being born every day. New companies have to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is the solar energy of the capitalist biosphere: entrepreneurship.
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If capitalism, and its essential generative act of entrepreneurship, are so great, how could we possibly have turned against them?
The answer is both democracy’s greatest failure, and its most obvious path to redemption.
For at least the past century, Democrats and Republicans have divided themselves by their views on the role of the state. Democrats see government as an essential partner in the national project: providing critical infrastructure like roads and airports, securing the national defense, providing basic education and health services, and ensuring that the rule of law is applied fairly and equally, both to the companies that help our economy thrive as well as to its individual citizens. Republicans share many of these same views, but where Democrats push for more, Republicans have generally wanted less: lower taxes, fewer regulations, and a generally less-generous redistribution of national income to those lower on the economic ladder.
But to obtain the levers of power needed to advance their respective goals, both parties have relied on the obvious carrot of legislative giveaways to secure blocs of electoral support: farmers, labor unions, business owners, real estate developers, the list is as endless and varied as the economy itself. The result is a regulatory and tax system so stuffed with incentives, tax breaks and special protections that any citizen, even and especially those favored by one set of legislated advantages, can point to those in another group and cry “unfair!”, “undemocratic!”, “corrupt!”
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It is this general stench of favoritism and corruption, slowly accreted over 250 years of electoral back-scratching on both sides of the aisle, that has brought us to our present crisis. Each party is so captured by its crazy quilt of protected electoral blocs and aggrieved parties, and so credibly able to point to the injustices perpetrated by the other side, that it becomes plausible to question the entire free-market edifice.
Great wealth now has the taint of theft, with no fine distinctions between entrepreneurial success and a systematic looting of the Treasury.
Things tend to continue as they began. So the most likely, and most depressing, scenario is that we are witnessing the final throes of the American idea. Two centuries of bipartisan regulatory capture have so encrusted our legislative and fiscal infrastructure that equal treatment under the law is now a bitter punchline, not the proud aspiration that once bound us together as a nation. Each party is now fully captive to its donor base, its electoral security purchased with gifts of regulatory ledgermain and dollars siphoned from public coffers, that there is precious little oxygen left for the promises on which the nation was built.
But to use this bipartisan failure of democracy to make a villain of capitalism, to paint as enemies of the state the few founders who have reaped extraordinary gains from their entrepreneurial ventures, when the vast majority are lucky to keep their employees paid and the lights of their modest establishments lit, is to eat out the very heart of the American project.
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This is already playing out in miniature at the state level. Traditionally Democratic states like Washington, Oregon and California are pursuing confiscatory tax policies that villainize entrepreneurial wealth. The net result is not the hoped-for increase in state tax revenue, but a highly visible and accelerating flight of entrepreneurial wealth and energy to more capitalist-friendly domiciles like Florida, Texas and Wyoming.
This is not to argue that the unexampled boon of living in a society where one can both earn and keep great wealth does not come with serious civic obligations. By all means use regulation to ensure fair and safe business operations and prevent abuse. Levy the taxes necessary to nurture our remarkable civic infrastructure, allowing entrepreneurs to build new companies from scratch without fear of expropriation, whether by criminals or the state itself. Unquestionably demand that corporations be positive civic actors, as if they were citizens themselves, with all the rights and obligations that entails.
But as a lifelong Democrat, and a passionate believer in the fundamental goodness of the American idea, I have one simple request for the party I still believe is most likely to carry our national experiment forward: recognize capitalist entrepreneurship as the motive force that has made our extraordinary success possible, and restore capitalism as one of the central pillars of our national promise.
By continuing to take our unprecedented prosperity for granted, you misunderstand both its source and its chances of survival. Worse yet, by demonizing the engine of our shared prosperity, you are sowing the seeds of our collective destruction.
Pragmata is drawing positive early reviews thanks to its inventive mix of third-person shooting and real-time hacking mechanics alongside striking futuristic visuals. The dynamic between its lead characters and the game’s strategic combat depth stand out as key strengths.
Sony is removing some features from its TV guide and program guide displays for channels received by an over the air TV antenna on select models of Bravia televisions from 2023-2025. Cord Cutters News reported on the changes, which will take effect in late May.
Channel logos and thumbnail images in program descriptions are going away from the built-in TV Guide for antenna TV channels. Only programs from recently watched channels will be shown in the guide, and depending on the channel, program information may not be displayed. Change is also coming for set top box users, with the dedicated Set Top Box TV menu being removed and replaced by a Control menu. This setup will also not show program thumbnail images any longer.
This is an admittedly narrow use case in the age of both streaming and cable TV, but Sony didn’t provide any reason for making the change. And for those people who are impacted, this could be an unpleasant surprise next month that makes the TV guide and program guide much less helpful.
Sony just joined the ultra-fast gaming monitor party, and though it was a bit late, it could potentially turn a lot of heads there. On April 14, the company announced the INZONE M10S II, a 27-inch QHD OLED gaming monitor featuring a tandem OLED panel sourced from LG.
Like other ultra-fast gaming monitors, the Sony gaming monitor pulls double duty between two modes: 540Hz at QHD, and a staggering 720Hz at HD. Developed in collaboration with esports powerhouse Fnatic, the monitor is a successor of the M10S.
Sony has priced the M10S II gaming monitor at $1,099.99. Availability, however, is expected later this year.
Sony
But what does 720Hz actually do for you?
For everyday users, the monitor should offer razor-sharp visuals in QHD resolution at a 540Hz refresh rate with virtually no motion blur and the visual richness of an OLED panel. At this setting, the monitor offers 0.02 ms response time, which is exceptionally good.
However, the 720Hz HD mode is reserved for hardcore, professional, competitive gamers, who’d rather sacrifice the resolution for pure speed. While I personally don’t know anyone who can make use of such speed, tournament-level FPS gamers, whose fate is determined at the last possible millisecond, could surely put it to good use.
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The monitor also features a new Motion Blur Reduction algorithm that unlocks extra brightness during frames. So, instead of going dark, fast on-screen movements remain vivid.
Sony
What else did Sony launch with the monitor?
Sony didn’t stop at the INZONE MS10S II monitor; the company also launched INZONE H6 Air, an open-back wired gaming headphone, which is priced at $199.99, inspired by the studio-grade MDR-MV1 headphones and weighing just 199 grams.
Rounding up the launch are new Fnatic Edition accessories, which include Mouse-A, Mat-F, and Mat-D, along with a new translucent Glass Purple finish of the INZONE Buds wireless earbuds, which are all available now.
Like many engineers, Sarang Gupta spent his childhood tinkering with everyday items around the house. From a young age he gravitated to projects that could make a difference in someone’s everyday life.
When the family’s microwave plug broke, Gupta and his father figured out how to fix it. When a drawer handle started jiggling annoyingly, the youngster made sure it didn’t do so for long.
Sarang Gupta
Employer
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OpenAI in San Francisco
Job
Data science staff member
Member grade
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Senior member
Alma maters
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Columbia
By age 11, his interest expanded from nuts and bolts to software. He learned programming languages such as Basic and Logo and designed simple programs including one that helped a local restaurant automate online ordering and billing.
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Gupta, an IEEE senior member, brings his mix of curiosity, hands-on problem-solving, and a desire to make things work better to his role as member of the data science staff at OpenAI in San Francisco. He works with the go-to-market (GTM) team to help businesses adopt ChatGPT and other products. He builds data-driven models and systems that support the sales and marketing divisions.
Gupta says he tries to ensure his work has an impact. When making decisions about his career, he says, he thinks about what AI solutions he can unlock to improve people’s lives.
“If I were to sum up my overall goal in one sentence,” he says, “it’s that I want AI’s benefits to reach as many people as possible.”
“I was interested in engineering, including the theoretical part of it,” Gupta says, “But I was always more interested in the applications: how to sell that technology or how it ties to the real world.”
In his spare time, Gupta built a smartphone app that let students upload their class schedules and find classmates to eat lunch with. The app didn’t take off, he says, but he enjoyed developing it. He also launched Pulp Ads, a business that printed advertisements for student groups on tissues and paper napkins, which were distributed in the school’s cafeterias. He made some money, he says, but shuttered the business after about a year.
After graduating from the university in 2016, he decided to work in Hong Kong’s financial hub and joined Goldman Sachs as an analyst in the bank’s operations division.
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From finance to process optimization at scale
After two parties agree on securities transactions, the bank’s operations division ensures that the trade details are recorded correctly, the securities and payments are ready to transfer, and the transaction settles accurately and on time.
As an analyst, Gupta’s task was to find bottlenecks in the bank’s workflows and fix them. He identified an opportunity to automate trade reconciliation: when analysts would manually compare data across spreadsheets and systems to make sure a transaction’s details were consistent. The process helped ensure financial transactions were recorded accurately and settled correctly.
Gupta built internal automation tools that pulled trade data from different systems, ran validation checks, and generated reports highlighting any discrepancies.
“Instead of analysts manually checking large datasets, the tools automatically flagged only the cases that required investigation,” he says. “This helped the team spend less time on repetitive verification tasks and more time resolving complex issues. It was also my first real exposure to how software and data systems could dramatically improve operational workflows.”
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“Whether it’s helping a person improve a trait like that or driving efficiencies at a business, AI just has so much potential to help. I’m excited to be a little part of that.”
The experience made him realize he wanted to work more deeply in technology and data-driven systems, he says. He decided to return to school in 2018 to study data science and AI, when the fields were just beginning to surge into broader awareness.
He discovered that Columbia offered a dedicated master’s degree program in data science with a focus on AI. After being accepted in 2019, he moved to New York City.
One of his major academic highlights, he says, was a project he did in 2019 with the Brown Institute, a joint research lab between Columbia and Stanford focused on using technology to improve journalism. The team worked with The Philadelphia Inquirerto help the newsroom staff better understand their coverage from a geographic and social standpoint. The project highlighted “news deserts”—underserved communities for which the newspaper was not providing much coverage—so the publication could redirect its reporting resources.
“Journalism was an interesting problem set for me, because I really like to read the news every day,” Gupta says. “It was an opportunity to work with a real newsroom on a problem that felt really impactful for both the business and the local community.”
The GenAI inflection point
After earning his master’s degree in 2020, Gupta moved to San Francisco to join Asana, the company that developed the work management platform by the same name. He was drawn to the opportunity to work for a relatively small company where he could have end-to-end ownership of projects. He joined the organization as a product data scientist, focusing on A/B testing for new platform features.
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Two years later, a new opportunity emerged: He was asked to lead the launch of Asana Intelligence, an internal machine learning team building AI-powered features into the company’s products.
“I felt I didn’t have enough experience to be the founding data scientist,” he says. “But I was also really interested in the space, and spinning up a whole machine learning program was an opportunity I couldn’t turn down.”
The Asana Intelligence team was given six months to build several machine learning–powered features to help customers work more efficiently. They included automatic summaries of project updates, insights about potential risks or delays, and recommendations for next steps.
The team met that goal and launched several other features including Smart Status, an AI tool that analyzes a project’s tasks, deadlines, and activity, then generates a status update.
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“When you finally launch the thing you’ve been working on, and you see the usage go up, it’s exhilarating,” he says. “You feel like that’s what you were building toward: users actually seeing and benefiting from what you made.”
Gupta and his team also translated that first wave of work into reusable frameworks and documentation to make it easier to create machine learning features at Asana. He and his colleagues filed several U.S. patents.
At the time he took on that role, OpenAI launched ChatGPT. The mainstreaming of generative AI and large language models shifted much of his work at Asana from model development to assessing LLMs.
OpenAI captured the attention of people around the world, including Gupta. In September 2025 he left Asana to join OpenAI’s data science team.
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The transition has been both energizing and humbling, he says. At OpenAI, he works closely with the marketing team to help guide strategic decisions. His work focuses on developing models to understand the efficiency of different marketing channels, to measure what’s driving impact, and to help the company better reach and serve its customers.
“The pace is very different from my previous work. Things move quickly,” he says. “The industry is extremely competitive, and there’s a strong expectation to deliver fast. It’s been a great learning experience.”
Gupta says he plans to stay in the AI space. With technology evolving so rapidly, he says, he sees enormous potential for task automation across industries. AI has already transformed his core software engineering work, he says, and it’s helped him enhance areas that aren’t natural strengths.
“I’m not a good writer, and AI has been huge in helping me frame my words better and present my work more clearly,” he says. “Whether it’s helping a person improve a trait like that or driving efficiencies at a business, AI just has so much potential to help. I’m excited to be a little part of that.”
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Gupta has been an IEEE member since 2024, and he values the organization as both a technical resource and a professional network.
IEEE’s member directory tools are another valuable resource that he uses often, he says.
“It’s been a great way to connect with other engineers in the same or similar fields,” he says. “I love sharing and hearing about what folks are working on. It brings me outside of what I’m doing day to day.
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“It inspires me, and it’s something I really enjoy and cherish.”
As a company, Fluke has been making electronic test equipment longer than the bipolar junction transistor has been around for. In that time they’ve developed a fairly stellar reputation for quality and consistency, but like any company they don’t support their products indefinitely. [ogdento] owns a Fluke meter that isn’t nearly as old as the BJT but still has an age well outside of the support window, and since the main problem was the broken LCD display they set about building a replacement for this retro multimeter.
Initially, [ogdento] had plans to retrofit this classic multimeter with a modern OLED, but could not find enough space for the display or a way to drive it easily. The next attempt to get something working was to build a custom one-off LCD using a drill press as an end mill, which didn’t work either. But after seeing a Charlieplexed display from [bobricius] as well as this video from EEVblog about designing custom LCDs, [ogdento] was able to not only design a custom PCB and LCD display to match the original meter, but was able to get a manufacturer in China to build them.
The new displays have a few improvements over the old; mostly they are more stylistically inspired by later Fluke models and have a few modern improvements to the LCD itself. There were are few issues during prototyping but nothing that was too hard to sort out, such as ordering the wrong size elastomeric strips initially. For anyone who needs to replace a custom LCD and can’t find replacement parts anymore, this project would be a great starting point for figuring out the process from the ground up.
If you have been waiting for Gemini to actually feel like it knows you, your wait is almost over. Google’s Personal Intelligence, which launched earlier this year for paid US subscribers, is now rolling out globally.
What is Gemini Personal Intelligence and what can it do?
Google
Personal Intelligence connects Gemini to your Google apps. Think Gmail, Google Photos, YouTube, Search, Maps, Calendar, Drive, and more. It uses your existing data to give smarter, more tailored responses without requiring you to explain everything each time.
The use cases are genuinely impressive. Ask Gemini for shopping recommendations, and it will factor in your recent purchases and style preferences. Stuck troubleshooting a device you do not remember buying? It can pull the exact model from your purchase receipts in Gmail.
Google
If you are planning a trip with a tight layover, Gemini can use Personal Intelligence to check your gates, walking time, and meal preferences all at once. It can even suggest a new hobby based on patterns it notices across your activity.
Google says this is an opt-in feature, so you choose which apps to connect. Importantly, Gemini does not train directly on your Gmail or Photos data. It references them to answer your questions, but keeps the underlying personal content separate from model training.
Who can use Gemini’s Personal Intelligence feature?
Personal Intelligence works across desktop, Android, and iOS with languages supported by Gemini. The global rollout is now live for Google AI Plus, Pro, and Ultra subscribers everywhere except the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the UK. Free Gemini users globally will get access within the next few weeks.
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Why does this matter?
Google
Personal Intelligence is probably the most significant thing Google has done with Gemini so far. Gemini is slowly becoming the kind of AI assistant that actually understands your life, not just the internet.
With access to Gmail, Photos, Maps, and more, Gemini will no longer feel like a generic chatbot and behave like a genuine personal assistant. No other AI assistant comes close to having this kind of data advantage baked in from the start.
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