Google has confirmed that the Pixel Watch’s next update will not arrive until March 2025, a departure from its usual monthly release schedule. The announcement came after the company skipped an October update, releasing the November 2024 update on Tuesday for all three generations of Pixel Watches.

Update schedule change for Pixel Watch

The delay marks a significant shift in Google’s approach to updates for its smartwatch. The Pixel Watch 3, which received its first post-launch update, along with the Pixel Watch and Pixel Watch 2, saw the continuation of the Wear OS 5 rollout. However, the tech giant clarified that the next update would not be available until March 2025, a three-month gap.

While monthly updates have been the norm for the Pixel Watch, the upcoming delay does not drastically affect user experience. Most of the updates released so far have focused on bumping the security patch level, with minimal new features introduced through system updates. Users can expect new features to arrive via the Play Store in the interim, as the smartwatch’s update cadence has traditionally offered fewer features compared to Pixel phones.

Why the delay?

Google’s decision to delay the next update could be part of a larger strategy to better allocate engineering resources. The company might be aiming to provide more substantial updates on a quarterly basis, allowing for more polished and well-tested features. While this is a departure from the usual rapid update cycle, it could also signal a shift toward more refined and larger-scale upgrades in the future.

The shift will likely allow Google to focus on improving the quality of updates, rather than merely maintaining a fast release schedule. The next update is now expected to arrive in March 2025, with more details to follow closer to the release.

Google is conducting a “test” that will omit results from EU-based news publishers. The company says the time-limited trial will only affect a small portion of users in nine EU countries and will help “assess how results from EU news publishers impact the search experience for our users and traffic to publishers.” But given the fragile state of the news media — and the company’s history of threatening to pull its services in the face of news-related regulations — it’s tempting to view it as the equivalent of a mob boss conducting a “little test” to see how the corner laundromat fares without its protection.

Google describes the experiment (via The Verge) as a “small, time-limited test” to omit EU results from search, Google News and the personalized Discover feed. It will only affect one percent of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain. Those users will still see results from other websites, including non-EU news publications.

The company says news results will reappear as usual once the test concludes. (It didn’t list a specific timeframe.) Google stresses that the experiment won’t impact the publisher payments it makes under the European Copyright Directive (EUCD), under which the company has inked deals with over 4,000 EU publishers.

Google does have a history of using the potential withdrawal of its visibility as a negotiating stick in similar situations. In some cases, the tactic has helped it draw concessions.

Last year, Google pulled its news links from Canada in response to Bill C-18 (the Online News Act), which required tech companies to negotiate compensation with online publishers for linked content. After months of negotiations, Google said Canada had addressed its concerns and given it a path to an exemption. Canada said it granted one to Google last month, with the company agreeing to pay $100 million annually to news organizations.

In April of this year, Google briefly removed links to California news outlets in response to the proposed California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), which would require Google to pay news publishers in exchange for continuing to link to their websites. Although the bill’s fate is still up in the air, Google struck a deal with state lawmakers this summer, committing tens of millions of dollars to a fund supporting local news.

In 2021, the company threatened to remove its entire search engine from Australia in response to a then-proposed law requiring tech companies to share royalties with news publishers. The nation’s then-Prime Minister stood firm. “Let me be clear. Australia makes our rules for things you can do in Australia,” Scott Morrison said. After the bill was passed and enacted, Google struck deals with Australian media companies to license content.

Google says it hopes the data analysis tools it provides publishers will help them use the EU test to “understand traffic patterns.”

A startup is training an AI model that it claims will enable creators to generate cinematic worlds, with complete control over the scenery, characters, lighting, and motion. How? By having humans strap cameras to their backs and hike around the world.

Odyssey, founded by self-driving pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke (Cameron was previously the VP of product at Cruise), says it’s created an “advanced camera capture system” that can collect data just about anywhere a person can reach. Weighing about 25 pounds, the system packs six cameras, two lidar sensors, and an inertial measurement unit.

Bearing a resemblance to Google’s Street View Trekker, the system can capture its surroundings in “3.5K resolution” and 360 degrees, with “physics-accurate” depth information metadata attached.

So what’s the point? Well, Odyssey says it’s taking data from the system and feeding it through algorithms to “capture the fine details that make up our world.” Essentially, the company’s generating digital reconstructions of real-world scenes — scenes with forests, caves, trails, beaches, glaciers, parks, buildings, and so on.

Now, it’s not totally clear how these reconstructions will translate to better generative tools for creatives. Cameron and Hawke have previously said that Odyssey has developed several generative AI models that create layers of visual detail, including object geometry, lighting, and motion, and then combine these into a single virtual “world” to create desired scenes.

Even the best “world models” today have limitations, and Odyssey doesn’t claim to have solved all these.

Nevertheless, it’s raising money to forge ahead. Odyssey today announced that it secured $18 million in a Series A funding round led by EQT Ventures with participation from GV and Air Street Capital. The new cash, which brings the company’s total raised to $27 million, will be put toward scaling up Odyssey’s data collection operations in California.

Odyssey plans to expand its data collection to other states and countries in the future — one would hope with privacy protections in place. (Google’s Street View team, for one, has found itself in the crosshairs of regulators for capturing images of everyday scenes that violated people’s privacy.)

“We think it will be impossible for generative models to generate Hollywood-grade worlds that feel alive without training on a vast volume of rich, multimodal real-world 3D data,” the company wrote in a post on its blog. “We believe an advanced generative world-building model will unlock a better way to create film, games, and more.”