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Google’s Gemini AI Assistant Reaches One Billion Users

The Gemini app icon in this illustration taken June 5, 2026. (Reuters)
The Gemini app icon in this illustration taken June 5, 2026. (Reuters)
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Google’s Gemini AI Assistant Reaches One Billion Users

The Gemini app icon in this illustration taken June 5, 2026. (Reuters)
The Gemini app icon in this illustration taken June 5, 2026. (Reuters)

Google's artificial intelligence assistant Gemini has surpassed one billion monthly users, CEO Sundar Pichai announced Tuesday, a week after a major reorganization of the tech giant's AI division.

"It's our fastest growing product ever," and the 14th product to reach a billion users, Pichai posted on social media.

The milestone, which Google calculated based on how many people use the Gemini app across its ecosystem, gives the search giant a victory amid a major overhaul of its AI division.

Demis Hassabis, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry, recently stepped back from the day-to-day management of Google DeepMind, the lab that designs the Gemini models. And several leading researchers left as well, including Jeff Dean, a central figure in the group's engineering efforts for nearly three decades.

Its new flagship model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, initially promised for June, still has not been released, while its rivals have launched several models that are considered more powerful, particularly for generating computer code -- currently the most lucrative area in the sector.

In the face of this technological lag, Google's audience remains its main asset as it integrates AI into its ecosystem, from search and Gmail to Google Maps and YouTube.

OpenAI reached one billion users across all its interfaces, led by ChatGPT, the lab announced in July without specifying whether that figure was monthly or weekly users.

The San Francisco-based AI lab sparked the artificial intelligence boom when it launched its free ChatGPT app in November 2022, and thus built its user base from scratch in under four years.

Every audience metric feeds into the valuation that OpenAI hopes to achieve with an eventual IPO, for which it filed a confidential application in June.

In a sign of tightening competition against Gemini, China's DeepSeek, and its San Francisco rival Anthropic, which makes Claude, ChatGPT's market share for AI assistants fell below 50 percent in the first half of the year, according to research firm Sensor Tower, which uses company data to estimate usage.

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Technology

OpenAI Begins Rollout of New Powerful AI Model GPT-6 Astra

The OpenAI logo in this illustration taken June 11, 2026. (Reuters)
The OpenAI logo in this illustration taken June 11, 2026. (Reuters)
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OpenAI Begins Rollout of New Powerful AI Model GPT-6 Astra

The OpenAI logo in this illustration taken June 11, 2026. (Reuters)
The OpenAI logo in this illustration taken June 11, 2026. (Reuters)

ChatGPT maker OpenAI said Thursday it would begin rolling out its newest and most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model to select customers, saying it had built in safeguards to mitigate security risks.

"At this level of capability, safety has to become our top priority," OpenAI President Greg Brockman told reporters on a call about the release of GPT-6, also known as Astra.

Just over a year has passed since OpenAI launched the previous version of its flagship model, GPT-5, said AFP.

Concerns about the capabilities of advanced models have grown since then, following incidents involving systems built by OpenAI and rival developer Anthropic.

OpenAI paused some model development for two weeks this summer after two models it was testing were involved in a security breach at AI platform Hugging Face.

The San Francisco-based company said Astra was developed with stronger safeguards after that incident, though Astra itself was not involved in the hack.

Some cybersecurity customers will get access to the new model Thursday, the company said, with a wider rollout to other paying customers to follow. Users on the free tier or the cheapest paid plan will not get access.

"We are working towards getting Astra in everyone's hands as quickly as we can; I know it is frustrating and I appreciate the patience. It should be quick," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on social media Thursday afternoon.

In a blog post, OpenAI said Astra can autonomously handle a wide range of "tedious" computer tasks, including website creation, scientific analysis, game development, cybersecurity and coding.

To illustrate the time savings of building autonomous AI agents with Astra, the company said the model could cut apartment hunting from six hours to under 10 minutes.

"It's not unreasonable to feel that we are now in the AGI era," Brockman said on the call, referring to artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical stage at which AI systems match human intelligence across most tasks.

OpenAI previously had an agreement with Microsoft, one of its earliest and largest investors, under which an exclusivity clause would end once OpenAI reached AGI. Those terms were scrapped in April.

- 'Limited window' -

OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki acknowledged there was still uncertainty about how a new model behaves once released.

"A model can become very good at achieving a goal, and it can still act in ways that go against what the person intended," Pachocki said on the same call.

"We also have to be willing to slow down or withhold further scaling when our confidence in safety is not sufficient," he added.

Altman explained in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Thursday afternoon why the company decided to release a new model with this level of uncertainty and risk.

"The world is very close to a complete change in the landscape of cyber attacks, and the only way that we see for society to collectively defend itself... is to use tools like Astra to rapidly defend against these new cyber threats," Altman said.

In July OpenAI confirmed that it had reached one billion active users across all of its products, including both free and paid users.

OpenAI, Anthropic and more than 100 other organizations signed an open letter last week calling for a coordinated global response to AI-related cybersecurity risks, warning that the window to strengthen cyber defenses was limited.

Anthropic went further on Monday, calling for industry-wide coordination on safety and on the pace of developing increasingly capable models.

"I believe that shared safety standards and international coordination on further AI development need to be prioritized now," OpenIA's Pachocki said on Thursday.

The US state of Alabama opened an investigation into OpenAI last week over the Hugging Face breach, his office citing what it called the company's complete lack of oversight and adequate safeguards.

It also comes as OpenAI and rival Anthropic are both racing towards becoming public companies over the next several months, though OpenAI might not hold its IPO till sometime in 2027, according to reports.

Technology

Deputy CEO of NCAI Highlights AI’s Future at DeepFest 2026

Deputy CEO of the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI) Dr. Hotham Altwaijry said the future of AI will be shaped by countries that can maximize the value of their technologies.(SPA)
Deputy CEO of the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI) Dr. Hotham Altwaijry said the future of AI will be shaped by countries that can maximize the value of their technologies.(SPA)
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Deputy CEO of NCAI Highlights AI’s Future at DeepFest 2026

Deputy CEO of the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI) Dr. Hotham Altwaijry said the future of AI will be shaped by countries that can maximize the value of their technologies.(SPA)
Deputy CEO of the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI) Dr. Hotham Altwaijry said the future of AI will be shaped by countries that can maximize the value of their technologies.(SPA)

Deputy CEO of the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (NCAI) Dr. Hotham Altwaijry said the future of AI will be shaped by countries that can maximize the value of their technologies. He explained that the current phase requires greater focus on using AI optimally and harnessing its potential to achieve tangible impact that benefits humanity and society, the Saudi Press Agency said on Friday.

His remarks came during the opening session of the fourth and final day of DeepFest 2026. He highlighted the evolving relationship between humans and AI, as well as technology's role in enhancing human capabilities and improving experiences.

Altwaijry explained that SDAIA recognized early on that a meaningful partnership between humans and AI cannot be achieved through algorithms, models, and technical concepts alone. Rather, it requires enabling individuals to experience AI’s potential firsthand.

He noted that AI has now become an integral part of today’s work environments, contributing to software development and testing, analyzing and preparing business requirements, and giving individuals greater space to focus on user experience, creativity, and exploring new ideas and solutions.

Technology

Abu Dhabi AI Institute Releases Fully Open-Source Models With Training Data, Code

A view of the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi (Asharq Al-Awsat)
A view of the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi (Asharq Al-Awsat)
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Abu Dhabi AI Institute Releases Fully Open-Source Models With Training Data, Code

A view of the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi (Asharq Al-Awsat)
A view of the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi (Asharq Al-Awsat)

Abu Dhabi-based research institute IFM on Thursday released six artificial intelligence models together with the data and methods used to build them, challenging an industry trend toward increasingly secretive AI development.

The K2 Horizon release includes model weights, training data, code, methodologies and intermediate checkpoints, allowing researchers to retrace the models' development process and reproduce results, IFM founder Eric Xing told Reuters.

The move goes beyond the "open-weight" approach used by some Chinese developers, which make models available for download but provide limited insight into how they were built, and contrasts with the more closed development practices of companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which neither release their models for download nor disclose the data and techniques behind them.

"Our goal with this release is to establish a reference point for what a truly open model release can look like," Xing said.

He said the release was also intended to show policymakers, regulators and public-interest advocates that "openness and competitive performance are not mutually exclusive."

The launch forms part of the UAE's push to establish itself as a global AI hub.

The model family ranges from one designed for smartwatches and other constrained devices to a 375-billion-parameter system for enterprise deployments.