Google Makes Surprise New Free Offer To Pixel 9 Pro Owners
After giving the Pixel 9 Pro XL its biggest discount yet and suddenly raising trade-in prices, which valued the Pixel 6a at $524, Google is now offering a year of Google AI Pro—for free—to Pixel 9 Pro owners.
The offer coincides with the company's continued expansion of its AI video generation model, Veo 3, which now has image-to-video capabilities. The new video-generation tools are available through Google's AI Pro plan ($19.99 per month), or the AI Ultra ($124.99. per month) subscription.
This offer only applies to the AI Pro subscription on the Pixel 9 Pro. It includes access to Gemini 2.5 Pro, filmmaking tool Flow, Gemini in Workspace apps and 2TB of storage, alongside other AI tools. To get the freebie, visit the Google One site, select the Google One tab, and sign up for the AI Pro plan. Let me know if it works.
Google Beefs Up Circle To Search Again With More AI Tools
AI Mode is coming to Circle To Search, which adds another AI toolset to the search feature's already long list of skills. AI Mode essentially brings Gemini's capabilities into Circle To Search. The idea is that after using Circle To Search, rather than just getting a short AI Overview summary of results, users will be able to quiz Gemini and dive deeper into their search without opening a new app.
Circle To Search can now work while playing a mobile game, too. Samsung demonstrated this at a Galaxy Z Fold 7 briefing earlier this week and Google has now made it official. The idea is that if you're struggling to get past a boss or area in a mobile game, activating Circle To Search will launch an AI Overview window (over the game) with tips and advice. There's no need to exit the game, which will continue after the window is closed.
Google says that Circle To Search, with a selection of these new tools, is available to more than 300 million Android devices. Because of its ubiquity, Google considers its visual search tool a vehicle for spreading AI tech to as many phones as possible. The feature isn't hardware-intensive and can run on virtually any phone. This is why we have seen repeated skill updates to Circle To Search.
In the last year, Google added full-page text translations, QR code scanning, song identification, text translation, maths problem solving, AI Overview summaries and now deeper AI Mode research.
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The incident, which was horrifying even by the standards of a platform that has become a haven for extreme speech, has raised uncomfortable questions about accountability when AI chatbots go rogue. When an automated system breaks the rules, who bears the blame, and what should the consequences be? But it also demonstrated the shocking incidents that can spring from two deeper problems with generative AI, the technology powering Grok and rivals such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. The code update, which was reverted after 16 hours, gave the bot instructions including 'you tell like it is and you are not afraid to offend people who are politically correct.' The bot was also told to be 'maximally based,' a slang term for being assertive and controversial, and to 'not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media.' The prompts 'undesirably steered [Grok] to ignore its core values' and reinforce 'user-triggered leanings, including any hate speech,' X's statement said on Saturday. 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'I think we're going to see more courts saying [these companies] don't get immunity: They're creating the content, they're profiting from it, it's their chatbot that they supposedly did such a beautiful job creating.' Grok's diatribe came after Musk asked for help training the chatbot to be more 'politically incorrect.' On July 4, he announced his company had 'improved Grok significantly.' Within days, the tool was attacking Jewish surnames, echoing neo-Nazi viewpoints and calling for the mass detention of Jews in camps. The Anti-Defamation League called Grok's messages 'irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic.' Musk, in a separate X post, said the problem was 'being addressed' and had stemmed from Grok being 'too compliant to user prompts,' making it 'too eager to please and be manipulated.' X's chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, resigned Wednesday but offered no indication her departure was related to Grok. AI researchers and observers have speculated about xAI's engineering choices and combed through its public code repository in hopes of explaining Grok's offensive plunge. But companies can shape the behavior of a chatbot in multiple ways, making it difficult for outsiders to pin down the cause. The possibilities include changes to the material xAI used to initially train the AI model or the data sources Grok accesses when answering questions, adjustments based on feedback from humans, and changes to the written instructions that tell a chatbot how it should generally behave. Some believe the problem was out in the open all along: Musk invited users to send him information that was 'politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true' to fold into Grok's training data. It could have combined with toxic data commonly found in AI-training sets from sites such as 4chan, the message board infamous for its legacy of hate speech and trolls. Online sleuthing led Talia Ringer, a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to suspect that Grok's personality shift could have been a 'soft launch' of the new Grok 4 version of the chatbot, which Musk introduced in a live stream late Thursday. But Ringer could not be sure because the company has said so little. 'In a reasonable world I think Elon would have to take responsibility for this and explain what actually happened, but I think instead he will stick a [Band-Aid] on it and the product will still' get used, they said. The episode disturbed Ringer enough to decide not to incorporate Grok into their work, they said. 'I cannot reasonably spend [research or personal] funding on a model that just days ago was spreading genocidal rhetoric about my ethnic group.' Will Stancil, a liberal activist, was personally targeted by Grok after X users prompted it to create disturbing sexual scenarios about him. He is now considering whether to take legal action, saying the flood of Grok posts felt endless. Stancil compared the onslaught to having 'a public figure publishing hundreds and hundreds of grotesque stories about a private citizen in an instant.' 'It's like we're on a roller coaster and he decided to take the seat belts off,' he said of Musk's approach to AI. 'It doesn't take a genius to know what's going to happen. There's going to be a casualty. And it just happened to be me.' Among tech-industry insiders, xAI is regarded as an outlier for the company's lofty technical ambitions and low safety and security standards, said one industry expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. 'They're violating all the norms that actually exist and claiming to be the most capable,' the expert said. In recent years, expectations had grown in the tech industry that market pressure and cultural norms would push companies to self-regulate and invest in safeguards, such as third-party assessments and a vulnerability-testing process for AI systems known as 'red-teaming.' The expert said xAI appears 'to be doing none of those things, despite having said they would, and it seems like they are facing no consequences.' Nathan Lambert, an AI researcher for the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI, said the Grok incident could inspire other companies to skimp on even basic safety checks, by demonstrating the minimal consequences to releasing harmful AI. 'It reflects a potential permanent shift in norms where AI companies' see such safeguards as 'optional,' Lambert said. 'xAI culture facilitated this.' In the statement Saturday, Grok officials said the team conducts standard tests of its 'raw intelligence and general hygiene' but that they had not caught the code change before it went live. Grok's Nazi streak came roughly a month after another bizarre episode during which it began to refer to a 'white genocide' in Musk's birth country of South Africa and antisemitic tropes about the Holocaust. At the time, the company blamed an unidentified offender for making an 'unauthorized modification' to the chatbot's code. Other AI developers have stumbled in their attempts to keep their tools in line. Some X users panned Google's Gemini after the AI tool responded to requests to create images of the Founding Fathers with portraits of Black and Asian men in colonial garb - an overswing from the company's attempts to counteract complaints that the system had been biased toward White faces. Google temporarily blocked image generation said in a statement at the time that Gemini's ability to 'generate a wide range of people' was 'generally a good thing' but was 'missing the mark here.' Nate Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School, said any move to broadly constrain hateful but legal speech by AI tools would run afoul of constitutional speech freedoms. But a judge might see merit in claims that content from an AI tool that libels or defames someone leaves its developer on the hook. The bigger question, he said, may come in whether Grok's rants were a function of mass user prodding - or a response to systemized instructions that were biased and flawed all along. 'If you can trick it into saying stupid and terrible things, that is less interesting unless it's indicative of how the model is normally performing,' Persily said. With Grok, he noted, it's hard to tell what counts as normal performance, given Musk's vow to build a chatbot that does not shy from public outrage. Musk said on X last month that Grok would 'rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge.' Beyond legal remedies, Persily said, transparency laws mandating independent oversight of the tools' training data and regular testing of the models' output could help address some of their biggest risks. 'We have zero visibility right now into how these models are built to perform,' he said. In recent weeks, a Republican-led effort to stop states from regulating AI collapsed, opening the possibility of greater consequences for AI failures in the future. Alondra Nelson, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study who helped develop the Biden administration's 'AI Bill of Rights,' said in an email that Grok's antisemitic posts 'represent exactly the kind of algorithmic harm researchers … have been warning about for years.' 'Without adequate safeguards,' she said, AI systems 'inevitably amplify the biases and harmful content present in their instructions and training data - especially when explicitly instructed to do so.' Musk hasn't appeared to let Grok's lapse slow it down. Late Wednesday, X sent a notification to users suggesting they watch Musk's live stream showing off the new Grok, in which he declared it 'smarter than almost all graduate students in all disciplines simultaneously.' On Thursday morning, Musk - who also owns electric-car maker Tesla - added that Grok would be 'coming to Tesla vehicles very soon. - - - Faiz Siddiqui contributed to this report. Related Content He may have stopped Trump's would-be assassin. Now he's telling his story. He seeded clouds over Texas. Then came the conspiracy theories. How conservatives beat back a Republican sell-off of public lands
