Google GOOGL
Google brings personalized Gemini AI assistant to Android Auto
Google is rolling out "Personal Intelligence with Gemini" to vehicles, starting Tuesday in Android Auto and expanding to cars with Google Built-in in the coming months. The feature lets Gemini draw on a driver's Gmail, Google Calendar, YouTube, Maps and Search history to understand their preferences and routines — for example, flagging a delayed flight when the driver is navigating to the airport, or answering a follow-up question about the gate number in the same exchange.
The upgrade extends a personalization feature that rolled out across the U.S. in March and is now in beta globally, pulling Google's car-based assistant deeper into its wider app ecosystem. Users must opt in, and Google says they can choose which apps to connect and switch the feature off at any time. Gemini first launched in Android Auto last November. Google (GOOGL) shares were down 1.13% at $340.27.
Spotify SPOT Google GOOGL
Spotify launches native Android Automotive app, starting with Audi
Spotify began rolling out a fully native in-car app on Wednesday, built directly on Google's Android Automotive operating system, in select Audi models including the A6 e-tron, Q6 e-tron, A5, Q5 and A6. Unlike phone-projection systems such as Apple CarPlay or Spotify's existing Android Auto integration, the app runs on the vehicle's own infotainment hardware, requiring no phone tethering, Bluetooth pairing or cables. Spotify says the application is "headful," meaning it renders its own interface rather than relying on Google's templates. "We're drawing all the pixels. We own the user experience," said Jonathan Tarlton, Spotify's automotive business development lead.
The app, more than a year in development, adds features not available through phone mirroring, including QR-code-based "Spotify Jam" sessions for passengers, a secondary passenger display for browsing and lyrics, and parked-mode video content on the central screen. Spotify said it is not abandoning CarPlay or Android Auto, which remain central to how most users listen in their cars, but the native app is designed to compete with phone projection directly by cutting startup delays and connection issues. The company plans to distribute the app as a standard Android Automotive APK across multiple app stores, including Google Play and automaker-specific stores such as Audi's, to avoid building bespoke versions for each manufacturer. Spotify shares were up 1.41% at $526.08 in regular trading; Google shares were down 1.13% at $340.27.
Meta Platforms META Nvidia NVDA
Meta keeps idle GPUs on standby to keep a million-chip cluster running
Meta's Prometheus supercluster, built to train models at a scale approaching a million GPUs, keeps tens of thousands of Nvidia chips deliberately idle at any given time, reserved as instant replacements for hardware failures rather than left running workloads. At that scale, component failure is constant rather than occasional, and keeping a model training run alive means swapping out dead or degraded GPUs without stalling the job.
The approach underscores how much of the cost and complexity of frontier AI training now lies in reliability engineering rather than raw chip procurement: sustaining a cluster of that size long enough to finish a training run requires spare capacity sitting unused, waiting for the next failure rather than adding to throughput. Nvidia shares were down 0.29% at $216.47 and Meta shares were down 1.59% at $694.25 in the regular session.
