America’s political binary — left and right, Democrat and Republican — can feel inescapable. But historically, it’s a relatively new development, and academically, some political scientists argue it’s nonsense: What we think of as immutable political realities are instead artificial alliances of political convenience. In this month’s Highlight cover story, senior correspondent Eric Levitz breaks […]

Josh Woodward, VP of Gemini and AI Studio, on the Google blog:

The best assistants don’t just know the world; they know you and help you navigate it. Today, we’re answering a top user request: you can now personalize Gemini by connecting Google apps with a single tap. Launching as a beta in the U.S., this marks our next step toward making Gemini more personal, proactive and powerful.

Personal Intelligence securely connects information from apps like Gmail and Google Photos to make Gemini uniquely helpful. If you turn it on, you control exactly which apps to link, and each one supercharges the experience. It connects Gmail, Photos, YouTube and Search in a single tap, and we’ve designed the setup to be simple and secure. [...]

Starting today, access is rolling out over the next week to eligible Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. Once enabled, it works across Web, Android and iOS and with all of the models in the Gemini model picker. We’re starting with this limited group to learn, but we will over time expand to more countries and to the free tier.

In the small print on the Gemini Personal Intelligence product page, they say “In the coming months, and with your permission, Gemini will be able to draw context from even more of your Google apps and services.” Gmail, Photos, YouTube, and Search are obvious services to start with. Calendar, surely, is forthcoming. But a big one for me — an inveterate note-taker — would be my notes app. I’d rather have an AI assistant know everything in my notes app than everything in my email. For Google, I presume, that will be Google Keep (which I consider a serviceable, but overall crummy app that never seems to have gotten much attention).

This is nicely honest, and sets expectations:

We’ve tested this beta version of Personal Intelligence extensively to minimize mistakes, but we haven’t eliminated them. You may encounter inaccurate responses or “over-personalization,” where the model makes connections between unrelated topics. When you see this, please provide feedback by giving the response a “thumbs down.”

Gemini may also struggle with timing or nuance, particularly regarding relationship changes, like divorces, or your various interests. For instance, seeing hundreds of photos of you at a golf course might lead it to assume you love golf. But it misses the nuance: you don’t love golf, but you love your son, and that’s why you’re there. If Gemini gets this wrong, you can just tell it (“I don’t like golf”).

I feel like it’s unlikely a coincidence that Google announced Personal Intelligence a few days after the short joint announcement that Apple is licensing Gemini technology to power the models for Apple Intelligence. What Google is making available today — in beta, to paid personal users only — is basically the feature set that Apple promised back in June 2024 but had to postpone for an entire additional year last March.

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The first big outage of 2026 has been resolved, with Verizon's wireless network now back online after experiencing issues yesterday. This follows Verizon customers across the US, including several Verge writers, finding that service was spotty or nonexistent starting at around noon ET on January 14th, with phones switching to SOS Mode and being unable […]