Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Google just turned its Cloud Next 2025 event into an AI showcase of epic proportions — revealing the company’s most powerful chip ever alongside upgrades across its entire ecosystem.

With a new agentic coding platform, Gemini 2.5 Flash, an agent-to-agent framework, and upgrades to image, video, voice, and music platforms, the tech giant is becoming a one-stop shop for all things AI.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Big AI day at Google Cloud Next 2025

• Google’s protocol for AI agent collaboration

• Build your first AI voice assistant with Vapi

• Samsung’s Gemini-powered Ballie home robot

• 4 new AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

GOOGLE

🤖 Big AI day at Google Cloud Next 2025

Image source: Google

The Rundown: Google announced a flurry of AI news at its Google Cloud Next 2025 event, including a new agentic coding platform, next-gen AI chips, upgrades to its video, audio, and image models, a new Gemini 2.5 Flash model, and more.

The details:

• Google’s Project IDX is merging with Firebase Studio, turning it into an agentic app development platform to compete with rivals like Cursor and Replit.

• The company also launched Ironwood, its most powerful AI chip ever, offering massive improvements in performance and efficiency over previous designs.

• Model upgrades include editing and camera control in Veo 2, the release of Lyria for text-to-music, and improved image creation and editing in Imagen 3.

• Google also released Gemini 2.5 Flash, a faster and cheaper version of its top model that enables customizable reasoning levels for cost optimization.

Why it matters: This quick summary doesn’t do justice to the full breadth of announcements, with Google’s AI advances reaching across every aspect of the ecosystem. Between top models, advanced chips, and now its own competing IDE, Google continues to pack an absolutely massive punch with each new AI reveal.

TOGETHER WITH METRONOME

🧩 Solve the pricing puzzle for AI products

The Rundown: Pricing an AI product right can often feel like solving a puzzle without the box cover. Join 49 Palms (ex-Simon Kucher, Author of Monetizing Innovation) and Metronome CEO Scott Woody to figure out how to build sustainable and effective pricing for AI.

In this session, you'll learn how to:

• Apply a 9-step pricing framework

• Monetize AI–whether it’s your core offering or an add-on

• Treat pricing as a product and confidently run pricing experiments

Register now to save your spot.

GOOGLE

🤝 Google’s protocol for AI agent collaboration

Image source: …

The Rundown: Google launched Agent2Agent, a new open protocol that enables AI agents from different developers and frameworks to communicate and collaborate, with backing from 50+ tech and service giants, including Salesforce, SAP, and PayPal.

The details:

• A2A enables agents to discover capabilities, manage tasks cooperatively, and exchange info across platforms—even without sharing memory or context.

• The protocol complements Anthropic's popular MCP, focusing on higher-level agent interactions while MCP handles interactions with external tools.

• Launch partners include enterprise players like Atlassian, ServiceNow, and Workday, along with consulting firms like Accenture, Deloitte, and McKinsey.

• The system also supports complex workflows like hiring, where multiple agents can do candidate sourcing and background checks without humans in the loop.

Why it matters: AI agents are rapidly growing in capabilities, but unlocking their true capabilities will require a standard, streamlined way to interact with each other across platforms and frameworks. A2A could build on the success of MCP, helping build an interconnected system that allows multi-agent collaboration to tackle complex tasks.

AI TRAINING

🎙️ Build your first AI voice assistant with Vapi

The Rundown: In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Vapi to create AI-powered voice assistants that handle phone calls naturally, with customizable voices and integration capabilities.

Step-by-step:

1. Head over to Vapi and create an assistant by either scratch or selecting a starting template.

2. Select your preferred AI model that will power your conversations and your desired transcriber for accurate speech recognition.

3. Choose a voice from Vapi's library or create your own voice clone.

4. Finally, add tools and integrations that let your assistant take in-call actions, like checking calendars, scheduling appointments, or transferring to human agents when needed.

Pro tip: Focus on optimizing response latency (to under 1.5 seconds) for a natural conversation flow. We just did an extensive workshop on building AI Voice agents at The Rundown University, led by Jordan Dearsley, the Founder & CEO at Vapi.

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What you'll learn:

• What's stopping you from getting more value from AI

• What a well-implemented AI application looks like

• How businesses should use AI (hint: not just as a chatbot)

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SAMSUNG & GOOGLE

🤖 Samsung’s Gemini-powered Ballie home robot

Image source: Samsung

The Rundown: Samsung and Google just announced a major partnership to launch Ballie—a soccer ball-sized home robot teased for years at Samsung’s CES events—with Gemini AI models under the hood.

The details:

• Ballie can roam homes autonomously on wheels, project videos on walls, control smart devices, and handle tasks through voice commands.

• The robot will combine Gemini models with Samsung's own AI, delivering multimodal capabilities for voice, audio, and visual inputs.

• It will launch in the U.S. and South Korea this summer, with plans for third-party app support also in the pipeline.

• Ballie, first revealed at Samsung’s CES event in 2020, has gone through several iterations over the years, but is only now getting an official release.

Why it matters: The AI consumer robotics race is shaping up to be the next big tech frontier, and few are as well-positioned as Samsung to lead it—leveraging their expansive SmartThings ecosystem and, now, the power of Google’s Gemini models to deliver truly ‘smart’ home robots that could redefine the category.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🗣️ Nova Sonic - Amazon’s new speech-to-speech AI voice model

• 🤖 Cogito v1 Preview - New open-source LLM model family trained using IDA

• 🔎 Gemini Deep Research - Now available with 2.5 Pro Experimental

• 🧠 Nemotron Ultra - NVIDIA’s 253B parameter open-source reasoning model

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🎨 Palantir Technologies - Product Designer

• 🧑‍⚖️ Horizon3 - Senior Attorney

• 🚀 Faculty - Senior Manager (Growth)

• 📋 OpenAI - Project Manager, Recruiting Operations

📰 Everything else in AI today

Anthropic announced a new premium Claude Max tier, featuring options for $100/mo and $200/mo, offering up to 20x higher rate limits and priority access to new features.

The U.S. government reportedly halted planned restrictions on NVIDIA’s H20 AI chips to China, following CEO Jensen Huang’s promises of new U.S. investments.

Moonshot AI released Kimi-VL, a lightweight 3B-parameter vision-language model that matches the performance of models 10x larger on reasoning tasks.

UCL researchers introduced MindGlide, an AI system that analyzes MS brain scans in seconds and outperforms existing tools by up to 60% in detecting disease progression.

The NO FAKES Act was reintroduced to Congress, with YouTube, OpenAI, IBM and others joining entertainment leaders in support of legislation to combat AI deepfakes.

OpenAI launched the 'Pioneers Program’, aiming to partner with startups on creating industry-specific model evaluations and AI systems for real-world applications.

The EU unveiled the “AI Continent Action Plan,” committing €200B to build 13 AI factories and aiming to triple data center capacity across Europe within seven years.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop this Friday at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the end of the workshop, you’ll have your own AI assistant that speeds up your workflow and helps you get more done, with less manual effort.

RSVP here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team