Agency > Intelligence I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency? Grok explanation is ~close: “Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path. People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next. It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”

A conversation with some of the research folks behind nano-banana 🍌 (aka Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) on how we got here, what it took to build this model, and where we go next! So much fun to hang with: @19kaushiks @robertriachi @m__dehghani @nbrichtova

Image generation with Gemini just got a bananas upgrade and is the new state-of-the-art image generation and editing model. 🤯 From photorealistic masterpieces to mind-bending fantasy worlds, you can now natively produce, edit and refine visuals with new levels of reasoning, control and creativity. A quick dive into Gemini 2.5 Flash’s capabilities 🧵

AI mode in Google Search is starting to roll out to all users in the US today : ) It's the search experience you know, reimagined for the AI era (including a new feature called "Deep Search")!

Last year, we introduced Project Astra: a research prototype exploring capabilities for a universal AI assistant. 🤝 We’ve been making it even better with improved voice output, memory and computer control - so it can be more personalized and proactive. Take a look ↓ #GoogleIO

Having a deep think...

🚨Breaking: @GoogleDeepMind’s latest Gemini-2.5-Pro is now ranked #1 across all LMArena leaderboards 🏆 Highlights: - #1 in all text arenas (Coding, Style Control, Creative Writing, etc) - #1 on the Vision leaderboard with a ~70 pts lead! - #1 on WebDev Arena, surpassing Claude for the first time This is the first-ever sweep across text, vision, and WebDev by any model!🥇 Huge congrats to @GoogleDeepMind on this incredible breakthrough!

Misplace your things often? These AI glasses could help. In this live demo at #TED2025, computer scientist @izadi_shahram debuts Google’s prototype smart glasses, powered by the new @Android XR system. Watch the full demo here: t.ted.com/z4hCFIU

Gemini 2.5 Flash just dropped. ⚡ As a hybrid reasoning model, you can control how much it ‘thinks’ depending on your 💰 - making it ideal for tasks like building chat apps, extracting data and more. Try an early version in @Google AI Studio → ai.dev

Gemini 2.5 Pro's leaderboard entry has been updated with costs, now that it available through a paid API. It cost $6 to run the aider polyglot coding benchmark on Gemini, lower than the top 10 other entries except for DeepSeek's models. aider.chat/docs/leaderboards…

Over the last decade the question I’ve gotten most often how I decide how to spend my work hours, so sharing here in case it helps anyone on the winding journey to develop theirs. The algorithm has sort of naturally converged on: 1) A mission I care deeply about that works to have positive implications at a humanity level scale 2) Good-hearted and high-octane teammates 3) Where my hours in feel like they have truly differentiated value relative to what another could provide 4) A consistently steep learning curve I remember being worried that 4 would cause me to job hop too much, but what I’ve found is if the problem is deep enough and high dimensionality enough you can have a steep learning curve for a heck of a long time. As an example, after almost 8 years at Neuralink I still feel like I find rocket-ship level learning curves to jump on every week, which I don’t think I would have predicted at the outset!

🥁Introducing Gemini 2.5, our most intelligent model with impressive capabilities in advanced reasoning and coding. Now integrating thinking capabilities, 2.5 Pro Experimental is our most performant Gemini model yet. It’s #1 on @lmarena_ai leaderboard. 🥇