🎵 Gemini turns photos into songs with Lyria 3 🎵
Google's first real consumer AI music tool lands inside the Gemini app.

Google has integrated Lyria 3, its most capable music generation model, directly into the Gemini app in beta — marking the company's first broadly available consumer AI music product. While earlier models like MusicLM stayed as research demos and the original Lyria was limited to YouTube's Dream Track experiment with a small group of creators, Lyria 3 is open to anyone. Users can generate 30-second tracks from text, image, or video prompts, with the model handling genre, tempo, vocals, lyrics, and cover art across eight languages. Free users get 10 tracks per day, and all output carries SynthID watermarking. This puts Google in direct competition with Suno and Udio in the fast-growing AI music generation space.

🌐 World Labs raises $1B for spatial AI 🌐
A massive round fuels integration of spatial AI into professional 3D design workflows.

World Labs, the spatial intelligence startup founded by Stanford AI luminary Fei-Fei Li, has closed a $1 billion funding round from investors including AMD, NVIDIA, Fidelity, and a notable $200 million from Autodesk. The company is building products like MARBLE, which generates cohesive 3D worlds from images, video, or text. The Autodesk partnership will specifically explore bringing world models into professional design and entertainment pipelines. Spatial AI could reshape gaming, architecture, and simulation industries — and this round signals investor conviction that AI must move beyond flat text and images into understanding the physical world.

📘 Mollick's 8th guide to picking AI models 📘
Wharton's Ethan Mollick helps professionals speed up their AI tool selection process.

Wharton professor Ethan Mollick has published the 8th edition of his widely followed guide on which AI model to use. The guide covers three key dimensions — models, apps, and harnesses — offering practical frameworks for selecting the right tool across providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and open-source alternatives. Its frequent updates highlight how quickly capabilities and competitive positioning shift. With options multiplying fast, this helps professionals cut through growing AI tool selection complexity. If you haven't bookmarked Mollick's guide yet, it remains one of the most accessible, practitioner-oriented resources for navigating the crowded agentic AI landscape.

INTERESTING TO KNOW

🔍 Perplexity drops ads to protect AI search trust 🔍

Perplexity is distancing itself from advertising, with executives stating that in-chat ads risk eroding user trust — a pricing and positioning bet on subscriptions over ad revenue. The move contrasts sharply with OpenAI, which recently started testing ads in ChatGPT, while Anthropic has publicly committed to an ad-free model. This monetization split signals diverging business strategies that could shape the long-term structure of the AI search market as these tools compete for user loyalty against both traditional search engines and rival AI assistants.

🧠 AlphaGo creator targets $1B for Ineffable Intelligence 🧠

David Silver, the legendary DeepMind researcher behind AlphaGo and AlphaZero, is reportedly planning to raise $1 billion at a $4 billion valuation for his London-based startup Ineffable Intelligence. The company focuses on reinforcement learning as a replacement for incremental LLM improvements, suggesting a differentiated path to advancing AI. If completed, this would be Europe's largest ever seed round — validating reinforcement learning beyond LLMs and reinforcing London's role as a global AI hub.