Source
Google's own announcements about consumer and developer AI products. Primary source for anything Gemini ships.
Google shipped it on August 13, 2026, 23 days after Gemini 3.6 Flash, with large gains on coding and agent benchmarks and an introductory price it labels as such. All of that holds. Four things are visible only if you open the model card instead of the launch post, and one of them is a score that went down.
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On August 20, Google announced that the Gemma family of open models has passed a billion downloads. In two years the community has published more than 100,000 derived models, and the most recent Kaggle competition drew more than 1,600 entries. An Awesome Gemma repository launched with the announcement, meant as an index of vetted projects, fine-tuned models, tutorials, and tools. The figure matters to someone building sites too, because a model you run on your own server stops being exotic, which makes text processing without sending data to a third party workable.
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On August 20, Google published a button a publisher places on its own page, which a reader clicks once to add that site to their preferred sources in Search. The consequence is that the site's pages appear more prominently in Top Stories, in AI Overviews, and in AI Mode. Google says users have chosen more than 600,000 different sources so far. Two reader-side changes arrived with it: tuning topics in the Discover feed through a three-dot menu, and a customizable audio briefing in Google News for Android.
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Google's agent can now drive the desktop version of Chrome, using accounts you are already signed in to and passwords saved in the browser. It books property viewings, prepares flight searches, and fills in forms, handing the task back to the user to finalize a payment, accept terms, or create an account. This is the same pattern that has settled in with Claude and the rest: the agent does everything up to the step that cannot be undone, and a person confirms that step.
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