News
- Google Cloud adds six new AI agents for data scientists, engineers and more
- Advanced analytics will become more accessible with natural-language AI
- A solid data foundation is just as important, but Google can help you migrate
Google Cloud has launched six new AI agent tools to assist data engineers, data scientists, developers and business users realize even more productivity benefits.
Outlining a, "new era where specialized AI agents work autonomously and cooperatively to unlock insights at a scale and speed," Data Cloud Managing Director Yasmeen Ahmad explained the benefits of a "single, unified, AI-native cloud" over siloed tools when it comes to using AI.
Besides new, specialized AI agents, Google Cloud is also launching a series of APIs, tools, and protocols as well as updates to unify data.
Google Cloud launches even more AI agentsThe first agent, destined for data engineers, is designed to automate complex data pipelines by allowing engineers to describe tasks and then autonomously building and executing workflows. A separate Spanner Migration Agent will simplify migrating from legacy databases like MySQL to Spanner, eliminating hours of tedious administrative work.
Data scientists will benefit from an agent that automatically performs exploratory data analysis, data cleaning, feature engineering and ML predictions, offering step-by-step reasoning and collaborative feedback, while business users and analysts will get to use two separate agents designed to answer questions about data and interpret code with visualisations and explanations, meaning that non-technical users can perform advanced analytics.
Finally, Gemini CLI GitHub Actions will automate pull requests, tests, reviews and implementation for developers.
"The true potential of the agentic shift is realized when developers not only use existing agents, but also extend and connect them to their own intelligent systems, creating a broader network," Ahmad explained.
With its new agents, Google Cloud hopes to lower the barrier of entry into advanced data analytics, "eras[ing] the line between operational and analytical worlds."
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- Perplexity says Cloudflare's analysis of its AI crawlers was technically flawed
- There seems to have been a mix-up with a third-party service used by Perplexity
- Perplexity wants Cloudflare to engage in dialogue – not just to post accusations online
Perplexity AI has accused Cloudflare of mischaracterizing its web crawlers as malicious bots after the latter claimed the AI company obfuscated its bot identity using deceptive strings and unexpected IP ranges.
Responding to Cloudflare's analysis and testing, Perplexity declared that analysis was technically flawed and that it misattributed unrelated traffic.
Perplexity has also asserted its traffic is user-driven, not stealth scraping or malicious crawling, suggesting that Cloudflare has misunderstood modern AI assistant behavior.
Cloudflare gets Perplexity all riled up"It appears Cloudflare confused Perplexity with 3-6M daily requests of unrelated traffic from BrowserBase, a third-party cloud browser service that Perplexity only occasionally uses for highly specialized tasks (less than 45,000 daily requests)," the company wrote in an X post.
Hitting back at Cloudflare's obfuscation claims, Perplexity said the company obfuscated its own methodology, even accusing the company of pulling off a stunt to gain attention.
One of Perplexity's possible explanations reads: "Cloudflare needed a clever publicity moment and we–their own customer–happened to be a useful name to get them one."
"This controversy reveals that Cloudflare's systems are fundamentally inadequate for distinguishing between legitimate AI assistants and actual threats," the post continues.
In the post, Perplexity also offered context about how AI crawlers work: when a user asks a question, the AI agent doesn't retrieve the information from a central database, but rather fetches it in real time from the relevant websites. This contrasts to traditional web crawling, "in which crawlers systematically visit millions of pages to build massive databases, whether anyone asked for that specific information or not."
Moving forward, Perplexity urges Cloudflare to engage in dialogue instead of publishing misinformation about its practices.
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- It seems as though game prices will remain variable going forward
- Analyst Matt Piscatella described the market as the 'Wild West' in a recent interview
- 'Publishers and developers are trying to find the sweet spot for their pricing,' he explained
Don't expect uniform game prices any time soon, a prominent industry analyst has warned.
In a recent interview with GamesRadar, Circana executive director of games Mat Piscatella said that prices are "a little Wild West right now."
"We have more variability in launch pricing and strategies than we've ever had. We have a lot of titles trying to kind of nibble at the high end of that market, and we have many more that are launching at lower prices," he continued.
It's not difficult to find examples of the irregularity in game prices these days. A physical copy of Mario Kart World launched at $79.99 / £74.99, while the recent Donkey Kong Bananza was a lower $69.99 / £64.99.
Death Stranding 2: On the Beach retailed for $69.99 / £69.99, while a massive role-playing game (RPG) like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, in contrast, cost just $49.99 / £49.99.
"Ultimately, publishers and developers are trying to find the sweet spot for their pricing strategy," Piscatella explained.
"If you look at the games that are pushing that higher end of that price envelope, those are games that have super dedicated fan bases in general, where price sensitivity, particularly at launch, is very low, meaning that people want to play this game no matter what it costs," he added.
"I know a lot of people don't like it, but people still buy these games at these high price points, so they're going to keep getting made at high price points for the right game that can do that."
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- Samsung has confirmed more One UI 8 schedule details
- The Galaxy S25 phones will get a full update in September
- One UI 8 Watch will hit older watches later in the year
The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7 launched with One UI 8 (based on Android 16) preinstalled, and the rollout for older phones isn't far off: Samsung has confirmed the Galaxy S25 series is going to get the software update in September.
Samsung confirmed the news in a press release, which also announced the ongoing One UI 8 beta program will expand to the Galaxy S24, Galaxy Z Fold 6, and Galaxy Z Flip 6 next week, before reaching more devices next month.
The testing phase for One UI 8 started back in May – and not long after the official introduction of One UI 7 in fact. Samsung is clearly keen to catch up to Google's Android launch schedule, which has been shifted further forward this year.
Among the features the software update brings with it are upgrades to Bluetooth audio (enabling multiple, simultaneous connections), improved sharing options, more capabilities for the Now Bar, and upgrades to on-device security.
Watch this spaceThe Samsung Galaxy Watch 8 comes with One UI 8 Watch (Image credit: Samsung)One UI 8 is going to be accompanied at some point by the One UI 8 Watch update for the best Samsung watches, but it looks as though the wait for that will be a little longer – it's going to arrive "later in the year" Samsung says.
You can already get One UI 8 Watch on your wrist, but only on a select number of models: the brand new Galaxy Watch 8 or Galaxy Watch 8 Classic, the refreshed Galaxy Watch Ultra for 2025, or the original Galaxy Watch Ultra launched in 2024.
As is the case with the phones and their software update, there is a beta available for watches too – but at the time of writing it's only available for the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 series and only if you're in the US or Samsung's home country of South Korea.
One UI 8 Watch brings with it a selection of useful upgrades, including new tools for monitoring sleep and improving your runs, and antioxidant measurements. More improvements, including Gemini AI, could be on the way too.
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