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AMC Entertainment Holdings (AMC) Shares Climbed, What Is Driving Attention Now?
AMC Entertainment Holdings (AMC) reported a strong Q2 earnings surprise, with revenue up 14.2% year on year and the stock climbing 48.7% since the report. AMC Entertainment Holdings has leaned into this momentum, with a 30-day share price return of 14.07% and a 90-day move of 36.89%, supported by the recent debt refinancing and the launch of its AMC Movie Trivia Game Show mobile app. The year-to-date share price return of 91.30% contrasts sharply with a 3-year total shareholder return that...
How much does Wurstfest cost in New Braundels?
Wurstfest returns November 6-15 with German food, live music and ticket prices that vary by day.
Sacramento news roundup: ICE incident, seized business and energy rank
From a congressman's call for ICE accountability to a State Bar raid that hauled off 14 boxes of files, here's what's driving Sacramento conversation.
Judi Dench shares regret about 'Cats' movie flop
There's one movie in Judi Dench's catalogue that she won't be watching any time soon.
Germophobe Primates Want to Avoid Getting Sick, Too
Some monkeys become significantly more cautious about food sources that appear contaminated after experiencing deadly outbreaks of disease.
NWTI, state office to host industry training luncheon on Thursday
Northwest Technical Institute (NWTI) in Springdale said Tuesday (Oct. 20) that it and the Arkansas Office of Skills Development will jointly host an event Thursday (Oct. 22) on short-term industry...
Toy Story 5, Backrooms and The Breadwinner Vie to Become the Second Biggest Film This Year...
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.) Often, people blame “data” for ruining Hollywood, when I’d argue that hype (which can often be debunked by data) is often worse, as you can see in these two headlines. To use a common meme, here’s how it started: and how it’s going: Earlier this year, I read countless (and I mean countless) articles (in almost every mainstream media outlet) about how Heated Rivalry was a huge hit and that it “heated” interest in hockey. But Heated Rivalry wasn’t a huge viewership hit compared to the hype: [ ](https://entertainment.substack.com/p/you-cant-eat-buzzdid-heated-rivalrys) [ You Can’t Eat Buzz…Did Heated Rivalry’s Buzz Translate into Actual Viewership? ](https://entertainment.substack.com/p/you-cant-eat-buzzdid-heated-rivalrys) Entertainment Strategy Guy · Jan 22 [ Read full story ](https://entertainment.substack.com/p/you-cant-eat-buzzdid-heated-rivalrys) In this case, the hype (Heated Rivalry is really popular) belied the data (It didn’t make the top ten charts, meaning it wasn’t a huge hit.1) Even worse, every time I write about this, I get a lot of negative feedback, hence why I only sparingly mention the show these days or add lots of caveats when I write about it, but this just further cements the hype. But companies, and the executives leading them, have to determine strategy based on reality, not media coverage. The NHL committed real marketing dollars to a campaign that didn’t work. Sure enough, the latest NHL season opened to under a million viewers. At some point, you have to focus on what the data says, because real dollars are at stake. And that’s why we have the Streaming Ratings Report! To provide and analyze cold, hard data. Luckily, this week, I can be positive and take a look at a huge opening on streaming, along with a very buzzy horror film that customers kind of like, but don’t really love. And a comedy that tried to rebound on streaming. Today, I’m covering two weeks—21-Sep and 28-Sep—so we have a lot to discuss (nearly 5,000 words worth), including a series of film misses for Netflix, another argument for weekly-released TV shows on streaming, another sitcom tries to avoid the comedy curse, Netflix has two new game shows (one powered by AI), Reacher falling off the charts after a huge run, Prime Video tries its hands at the romcom game**,** a look at the WNBA’s big season, a big night for the VMAs on CBS and MTV, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more. (Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, JustWatch and Reelgood interest data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the weeks of September 14th to October 4th, 2026. You can find a link to my terminology here.) Subscribe Film - Two Hits and a Miss Come to Streaming… Three very interesting films came to streaming in one week, and I like comparing them since they show the range of theatrical films. One was a huge blockbuster, one was popular, and one was neither. One is a horror film, a buzzy genre; one is a comedy, a struggling genre; and one is an animated family film, the king of the box office. One went to a tiny streamer (HBO Max), one went to a second-tier streamer (Disney+), and one went to the biggest (Netflix). So… If you just went by box office, you’d expect Backrooms—the $197 million grosser, and partner of Obsession for “YouTube Horror Summer”—to dominate on streaming. If you read this report, though, you know that horror films don’t do great on streaming, and that’s the case again. Backrooms opened at 3.8 million hours according to Nielsen, and had 3.9 million hours in its second week. Here’s how that stacks up to other HBO Max films: We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… ...why I don’t buy Backrooms budget… …two new games shows arrive on streaming… …another sitcom struggles… ...another argument for putting out shows weekly on Netflix... ...and a whole lot more, nearly 5,000 words more... ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support. If you want an idea of just how much content you’d get in a full issue, check out this older issue. Coming Soon! Next week, I’ll be taking a look at the eighth season of Hulu’s The Kardashians, answering the question: will this show ever make the charts? If Mormon wives can make it, surely one of social media’s most popular families can as well. Also, Prime Video has a new horror show based on popular IP, Carrie, Netflix has a horror show starring Josh Hartnett, Below, and Apple TV has a UK import, Small Prophets. Plus a bunch of movies like Disclosure Day heading to Peacock, The Housemaid coming to HBO Max, Ben Affleck’s latest on Apple TV, Animals, and Matchbox the Movie on Apple TV, a John Cena action comedy inspired by Hasbro’s toy cars. The week after is even busier! I’ll look at another IP-based horror show, Crystal Lake, a new MCU show on Disney+, VisionQuest, season two of The Lowdown on FX/Hulu, the fourth seasons of The Diplomat on Netflix and Tulsa King on Paramount+, another season of Love is Blind, and four straight-to-streaming films: Netflix’s Sacrifice (starring Chris Evens, Anya-Taylor-Joy, Vincent Cassel, John Malkovich, Salma Hayek. Charlie XCX), Apple TV’s Tenzing (starring Tom Hiddleston and Willem Defoe), Prime Video’s Love of Your Life (Margaret Qualley) and Masterplan (Stanley Tucci) and a whole lot more, somehow. Long term, here’s some huge IP news: a Game of Thrones movie is coming to theaters, Game of Thrones: Aegon’s Conquest in 2029, while Jon Watts (who helmed three of the most recent Spider-Man movies) is directing the next Star Wars trilogy, to be written by Simon Kinberg. I’m cautiously optimistic for both. It feels obvious to say that making good movies matters, but for bets this big (Star Wars is on a swoon, Game of Thrones hasn’t been to theaters yet), the quality has to be there.
Commentary: The slime machine in Ohio politics has reached a despicable new low in the 2026 election
I knew 11 years ago that our public discourse would be degraded down into unfathomable levels. The 2026 campaign in Ohio has now confirmed it beyond anything I could've imagined.
What Trump’s Women’s Health Plan Promises
The administration's promises deserve a much closer look.
Fears of a post-midterms Trump rampage spur ‘brutal’ internal jockeying
President Donald Trump still has two weeks to salvage his Republican congressional majorities and defy expectations of a midterm wipeout. But all around him, aides and allies are bracing for what happens if he fails.
40 Years of Superconductor Science Just Got Turned Upside Down by a Stunning Discovery
A material that carries electricity without resistance may be held back by its own structure, challenging 40 years of assumptions about copper-based superconductors.
From Our Partners: The Hidden Devices Putting Your Small Business at Risk
During Small Business Month 2026 alone, Comcast Business detected and blocked 230 cyber threats targeting small businesses per second. That finding carries added weight across the Eastside.
Bank OZK posts quarterly declines in income and revenue
Little Rock-based Bank OZK on Tuesday (Oct. 20) announced declines in quarterly net income and revenue, and in its management comments noted that some of the bank’s commercial real estate...
As flag football becomes official sport in Oregon, Salem-Keizer coaches, players hopeful about future
The decision is particularly meaningful for some Salem-Keizer Public Schools teams that have been invested since the sport began gaining popularity in 2023.
How governments worldwide are shaping what AI can say about politics
With the U.S. midterms approaching, about one in five voters has asked AI chatbots about elections and politics, a recent survey found.
Is Mold in Coffee a Real Problem? Here Is What the Science Says Before You Panic
Is mold in your morning coffee actually a problem? Food scientists say probably not and here is why.
Is Mold in Coffee a Real Problem? Here Is What the Science Says Before You Panic
Is mold in your morning coffee actually a problem? Food scientists say probably not and here is why.
What to stream: 'Yaga' joins coven of witchy murder mysteries
The highly anticipated Crave series “Yaga” finally arrives on AMC+ this week, a witchy, sexy murder mystery that’s a perfect autumnal watch. The series, based on the play by Kat
2026 Minnesota Golden Gophers in the NFL: Week 6
Between injuries and bye weeks, Week 6 was quiet for the former Gophers in the NFL. With one exception that is…
October 22 Vallejo/Vacaville Arts-Entertainment Source: Faces and Places
“Building APAPA with you has been one of the greatest honors of our lives. We are proud of these past 25 years, and we are excited to see what this generation and future generations will do next,” C.C. Yin proudly said.
Tracy McGrady strikes two-year partnership with NBC Sports
Five months ago, Tracy McGrady wasn’t sure NBC wanted him back for a second season, and now the network is effectively going into business with him. In an exclusive interview with The Athletic’s Jerry Brewer published Tuesday, McGrady unveiled a two-year strategic partnership with NBC Sports that puts his Ones Basketball League games on Peacock,…
'A Matter-Of-Fact Business': Matt Campbell Doubles Down On Penn State Football's Approach To Playing Time
"For so many of the guys that are playing, there's videotape evidence of why they've earned the right to be on the football field playing for us right now."
Apple CEO John Ternus says design still means everything & includes whimsey
"Design is how it works" rings true at Apple today, and John Ternus wants to assure everyone that respect for the user and building products that are beneficial is "job one."
OCPS rejects compromise on teacher health insurance ahead of school board hearing
Orange County Public Schools rejected on Tuesday a compromise on health insurance costs meant to break a months-long contract dispute between the district and its teachers union, saying that a special...
What happened to Ben Kindel? NHL player suffers 'medical episode' on plane
Pittsburgh Penguins forward Ben Kindel was taken to a Utah hospital Tuesday after suffering a "medical episode" on the team plane.
Sphere Entertainment jumps as investors appear to bet on a short-covering rebound
Sphere Entertainment Co. (SPHR) is up 9.4% today. Here is some analysis on what might have caused this price movement.Analysis: There does not appear to be a single fresh company announcement driving Tuesday’s move, so the rally looks most likely tied to short covering and bargain hunting after a steep pullback earlier this month. Investors may also be revisiting Sphere’s underlying growth story, including strong performance from its Las Vegas ve
Older breast cancer survivors fall through Medicare home health gap
Among the increasing number of women who survive breast cancer, many older, long-term survivors remain frail. A new study out today in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute shows that in a given ...
It Looks Like GTA 6's Beer Brands Are About to Become Real
It appears that Rockstar may be preparing to sell beer brands from GTA 6 in real life.
Could Our Universe Be a Simulation? ‘Glitches’ at the Limits of Reality Could Offer Clues, Physicists Suggest
A simulated universe implies that the cosmos has an intentional design—or does it?
Opero Relaunches as a Firm That Designs, Builds, and Operates Custom Business Systems
MIAMI, October 20, 2026--Opero (opero.com) has relaunched as a services firm that designs, builds, and operates custom business systems that replace SaaS platforms like Salesforce. The firm designs how a business should work, including the process and the experience for staff and customers, then architects, builds, and runs the system.
Experts Reveal How MS Can Be Misdiagnosed Amid Christina Applegate’s Surprising Health Update
Christina Applegate is searching for answers after learning that she was misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) five years ago — and medical experts say several conditions can be mistaken for MS, m...
What does a healthy brain look like? Turns out it’s all relative.
Northeastern researchers explore how our closest ties affect brain health, and how understanding those bonds could change mental health care.
When I was 8 years old, Carl Sagan showed me the universe I want you to see
I have always tried to pattern my interactions with my program audiences like Carl might have done. Every chance I get to do that is one more opportunity I have to spark someone else’s interest in science.
OpenAI acquires startup Orchestra Bio to beef up its biotech business
OpenAI says it's adding Orchestra's team and technology to work on Rosalind, its AI model for life sciences research, and to its related Rosalind Workbench tool, a harness that aims to help researchers plan experiments and analyze results.
Atlanta Hawks strike in-market streaming deal with Prime Video
As the Atlanta Hawks prepare to tip-off their season Wednesday against the Orlando Magic, the team has moved to create one of the more fan-friendly streaming arrangements in the entire league. The Hawks announced Tuesday that all local broadcasts will stream on Amazon Prime Video for fans within the team’s regional footprint at no extra…
Hackensack Meridian Health signs definitive agreement to acquire Hunterdon Health, commits $230M
Hackensack Meridian Health has signed a definitive agreement to pick up Central New Jersey’s Hunterdon Health, a $230 million deal that would grow the state’s largest health system to 19 total hosp | The announcement did not outline a potential timeline for the merger, which would add a nineteenth hospital to New Jersey's largest health system.
The truth of 'Dancing with the Stars' – What training with a pro is really like
Editor's note: Anna Kaufman is a former reporter at USA TODAY, who trained with a pro dancer from "Dancing with the Stars" to see what the process is really like. This story originally ran in November 2025.
UAFS launches manufacturing academy
The manufacturing academy at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith (UAFS) began this week and has 20 participants receiving a training cycle for free that would cost almost $4,000,...
Former sheriff accused of killing judge wins pause on second mental health evaluation
LETCHER COUNTY, Ky. (WJHL) — The former Letcher County sheriff accused of killing a judge in his chambers has managed to temporarily halt an order that would have required him to undergo a second m…
NC State’s Agroecology Education Farm: Where Agriculture, Ecology and People Connect
Walking through rows of leafy greens, ripe, red tomatoes or rich-smelling rosemary at the Agroecology Education Farm, it’s easy to feel more connected to where your food comes from. And with a mission rooted in community outreach, that's the point.
Ilhan Omar's daughters show up at scene of DC raid as rumors swirl about embattled rep's whereabouts
Isra Hirsi was spotted entering Ilhan Omar's D.C. home under cover of darkness as Capitol Police were called to the residence later that evening.
Regional Banks Put AI Into Core Operations as Business Lending Grows
Third-quarter results from PNC, U.S. Bancorp, Truist, Fifth Third, Regions and KeyCorp show that regional banks are putting artificial intelligence into
Trump to rally in North Carolina, even as GOP pulls its money
Michael Whatley, the state’s Republican Senate candidate, owes his nomination to Trump; the president continues to invest time, if not cash, on his behalf.
Devastating 2025 Myanmar earthquake sheds light on how the 'Big One' could play out in California
The fault that triggered a massive earthquake in Myanmar last year is tilted much like California's San Andreas, which can influence how much shaking takes place and where.
Halloween fun with a slice of science
Halloween can be many things: spooky, enchanting, fun, creative, mysterious and…scientific? That last word is what Walking Mountains Science Center hopes to bring to light when kids and families attend Fright at the Museum on...
BayMark Completes Out-of-Court Debt Restructuring
Lewisville, Texas-based BayMark Health Services announced Monday that it completed its new-money recapitalization and a debt-for-equity
Orange County Public Schools rejects salary and health insurance recommendations
OCPS said declining enrollment and what it described as insufficient state funding have put additional pressure on its budget
Seattle Public Theater’s ‘नेहा & NEEL’ is a fun, heartwarming journey
“नेहा & NEEL,” a coproduction from Pratidhwani and Seattle Public Theater, is all about the journey and what it teaches us.
Kansas to ‘Carry on Wayward Son’ at Hard Rock Feb. 4
With a music catalog that continues to resonate with generations of fans, classic rock band Kansas is making its return to the Hard Rock Live stage inside Hard Rock Hotel
Thrifting and oysters: Check out 10 business updates in downtown Austin
Businesses that are now open, coming soon, in the news or closing in downtown Austin.
University of Maryland expands key reproductive health program
The school is using more than $16 million in state grant funds over five years to build on previous work that already trained more than 100 clinicians, students and other health professionals in abortion care.
“Crystal Lake” showrunner complains about not showing nudity: ‘That’s America’
“You can give the kids the violence, but God forbid they see some breasts.”
Xbox Game Pass Reportedly Getting 'Major Overhaul,' Will Feature 'À La Carte' Options
Microsoft is reportedly planning a substantial revamp of Xbox Game Pass that will allow subscribers to choose the features they want in an à la carte fashion. The report comes by way of a new Fortune profile piece on Xbox CEO Asha Sharma.
WA leaders push back as federal health cuts threaten millions
Washington lawmakers warn that federal health cuts could cost hospitals billions and hike premiums, drawing debate ahead of the midterms.
Dear Tim Sweeney, You Could Learn A Thing Or Two From The Xbox Exec Who Posted So Bad That He Had To Delete His Account
A better world is possible
Oregon to increase 2027 payments to care organizations for Health Plan members
Oregon health officials say that they expect the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid to approve the rise by the end of 2026.
Online Communities Rarely Focus on Politics, and Many Say It Should Stay That Way
Most people in online communities see little to no politics in their go-to space, and 54% say it doesn't belong there.
Medicare paying billions in Utah health care, new study shows
Medicare is spending $6 billion on Utahns yearly as enrollment in the health insurance program inches closer to 500,000. That’s the most any federal health care program is spending on the Bee…
Kalamazoo commission opposes health board ballot measure
KALAMAZOO, Mich. (WOOD) — Kalamazoo city commissioners are telling voters to be wary of a ballot proposal that would create a citizen-led healthcare advisory board. The commissioners voted unanimo…
Judi Dench still hasn’t seen “Cats”, calls it a ‘waste’ of talent in new memoir: ‘I can’t bear it’
She confessed that she “didn’t feel right” in her role as Old Deuteronomy.
The Metro: Donavan McKinney hopes to inject more humanity in politics
Democratic party member and progressive Donavan McKinney sits down with The Metro to discuss what he'll deliver if elected to the House.
Big software firm is moving headquarters from Chicago to downtown New Orleans. Here's why.
"Talented people shouldn’t have to leave Louisiana to build careers at the forefront of that transformation.”
Sphere Entertainment (NYSE:SPHR) Shares Climb 9.4%
Sphere Entertainment (NYSE:SPHR) Shares Up 9.4% - Here's What Happened
Movie review: 'Wicker' weaves a feisty feminist fable
It’s too bad the title “The Wicker Man” was already taken, as that’s literally what star Alexander Skarsgård is playing in “Wicker,” a randy little ditty of a film from
Riots leave France divided and shadowed by debt as Macron enters his final run
The tensions are festering in the street but also in a presidential race that will determine Emmanuel Macron’s successor.
ChatGPT now lets you lock your chats
The company says the feature is designed for situations where users might be discussing something personal or planning a surprise and want to keep those conversations private when handing their device to friends or family to show them something in another chat.
Spurred by Pulitzer Prize-winner's visit, business leaders grapple with state's housing crisis
The capital of Georgia — a city of more than 500,000 people nearly 1,200 miles away, where African-Americans outnumber their white counterparts — bears a striking similarity to New Hampshire’s capital. In Atlanta, like in Concord and countless municipalities across the country, housing costs have far eclipsed what working people can afford. Brian Goldstone, journalist […]
Why child sexual abuse is our biggest public health crisis
An estimated one in five children will experience some form of sexual abuse before the age of 18. In this episode of Settle In, Amna Nawaz speaks with clinical psychologist Elizabeth Letourneau and journalist Luke Malone, authors of “One in Five,” a book that explores child sexual abuse as a public health crisis, about how education and early prevention can help protect children before harm occurs.
Falcons’ Tua Tagovailoa Faces Uncertain Future After Andy Dalton Signing
The Atlanta Falcons made a pair of quarterback roster moves on Monday. No, neither of them directly involved Tua Tagovailoa, Atlanta’s current backup QB. The fact that the moves happened at all, though, raised questions about Tua’s future with the Falcons. Falcons QB Moves The Falcons chose to sign free agent QB Andy Dalton, the […] The post Falcons’ Tua Tagovailoa Faces Uncertain Future After Andy Dalton Signing appeared first on HEAVY.
Samsung Has Already Found the Next Way to Unfold a Phone
A leaker claims that the long-awaited Galaxy Z Slide is finally upon us.
Here's What Apple's Apps Look Like on the iPhone Duo
With just three days to go until the iPhone Duo is released, Apple is getting ready for the launch. Behind the scenes, the App Store now has screenshots of Apple's built-in apps running on the Duo. We've seen some apps in marketing materials, but images of the ones we haven't seen give us an idea of what it will be like using the iPhone Duo day to day.
U.S. Postal Service says it’s business as usual for the 2026 election. Here’s what you need to know
Voters are advised to mail their ballots BEFORE Election Day, and AT LEAST ONE WEEK before they must be received by their election office.
Going with the Flow - College of Arts and Sciences
Scott Gifford studies the microscopic organisms that shape water quality, ecosystems, and Earth’s climate.
The Secret to Life on Earth Was What Made It Stop Being a Poisonous Ice Ball
Ancient South African rocks expose the chain reaction behind life’s first real growth spurt.
John M. Williams on hunting rights, wolves and the urban-rural divide
Colorado hunter, angler and founder of Colorado Wolf Tracker, John M. Williams, joins The OpEdge to discuss Amendment 83, wolf reintroduction and the growing divide between urban and rural Colorado. Williams tells host and deputy opinion editor Antonio Olivero why he believes protecting hunting and fishing rights is essential to wildlife conservation, what he sees […]
Hackensack Meridian Health, Hunterdon Health sign definitive merger agreement
RARITAN TOWNSHIP, N.J. (Hunterdon County) — Hackensack Meridian Health and Hunterdon Health have signed a definitive merger agreement that includes $230 million in planned capital and technology investments, bringing the …
United CEO Scott Kirby wants a nationwide wealth tax
United CEO Scott Kirby said that income inequality "has become a danger to our society."
The Inevitable And Unavoidable Dylan Garand Watch
No matter how you shake it – or bake it, for that matter; your call not mine – Dylan Garand must remain in our critical crosshairs.
How to watch the 2026-2027 NBA season: What streaming services do you need?
The national streaming lineup remains the same, but local broadcasts are a hot mess.
Sundar Pichai: Google’s Frontier Imperative, Compute Scarcity Dilemmas, Future AI Products and Businesses
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has little patience for doubts about Google’s willingness or capacity to compete at the frontier of AI. His company’s latest Gemini 4 Argon model — long-promised and recently delivered — beats OpenAI and Anthropic’s latest public models on coding, math, science, and knowledge-work benchmarks and has placed Google’s AI back among the world’s best. Amid chatter that Google was fine with good-enough lightweight ‘Flash’ models, Pichai pushed back hard against any suggestion that company is limiting its research ambitions. “We won’t do it any other way,” he told me in a Big Technology Podcast interview recorded this week at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Pursuing cutting-edge research is costly for Google, requiring compute and chips that otherwise could be sold at a high markup by its cloud business. But Pichai said allocating resources to frontier AI development is “ground zero” for Google. “Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development,” Pichai told me. In our conversation, we discussed Argon (which Pichai says processed three times as many tokens as Gemini 3 in the 72 hours after launch), AI’s role in developing better models, the AI interface of the future, competition with OpenAI, Google’s partnerships with Anthropic and Apple, data centers in space, and the nature of his optimism. You can read the full conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, below, or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice. Alex Kantrowitz: Google is back at the frontier with Gemini 4 Argon, which beats OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s public models on benchmarks spanning coding, math, science, and knowledge work. The conventional wisdom was that Google had given up on the frontier to focus on fast, good-enough models for its products. That was wrong? Sundar Pichai: Very wrong. Look, we are so committed to being at the frontier. It’s in our DNA. We won’t do it any other way. We’ve been thinking about the AI frontier for well over a decade now. The frontier is very dynamic. It’s very competitive. It’s very exciting. I couldn’t be more pleased with how Argon has come together. We took our time with it. We made sure we tested it safely and deployed it carefully. We took a bit longer than our other models, given its capabilities. Across the board, be it for agentic work, knowledge work, coding, creative tasks, Argon is one of the really good frontier models. The first 72 hours since we launched, it’s almost up to 25 trillion tokens used, which is about three times what Gemini 3.0 had in the first 72 hours. And we are capacity constrained as we are serving it. Excited, but there are always areas….. You know, the frontier is very dynamic, and you have to keep evolving the models. There are areas which we can see we need to improve as well. We’ll be at work on all of that as well. Which areas? On any given model, Argon would be across the board better at everything if you just look even two months back. But the space is so evolving. Even on coding, for example, there are pockets where we know we need to do better, and there’s clear feedback. We’ll make it better. The argument for standard models is that they’re already good enough to build great products, with the frontier valuable only for certain tasks. Meta built Muse with good models rather than the best, and Google could put standard models into Maps, Gmail, and Search. Why isn’t that sufficient? It’s definitely not how I have thought about it at all. We are deeply committed to driving the state of the art and actually pushing where this technology can go, all the way from transformers. That’s a journey we’ve been on. You will see us continue to do that. When you’re at the frontier, you get an earlier look into the emerging capabilities, earlier than others, which helps you better prepare for the future. We are fortunate to have a wide set of opportunities across consumer and enterprise. Some of our cloud customers, for sure, want the model at the frontier. The frontier models will be better at developing the next set of models in an era of recursive self-improvement. I would argue it matters there. Internally, we have definitely seen a steep point of inflection by deploying Argon to our developers. It definitely tackles problems which our previous models could not do. Being at the frontier puts you at the innovation frontier and helps you drive that as well. There is room for models of all sizes and capabilities. That’s why we did Flash, Flash-Lite, etc. I agree with you that you can develop very good product experiences with not necessarily the most frontier model, because they tend to be slower and more expensive too. But we care about the Pareto frontier, and we’re committed to doing all of that. You said developing frontier models gives you a look at what’s coming. What do you see on the horizon? What makes this moment so exciting is you build something which you think is a culmination of months of work, and you put it out. You already see clear headroom ahead. We’ve all been working on these agentic, long-horizon capabilities, but clearly the frontier is going to have multiple of these agents working together to do things. That’s an example of an exciting paradigm underway. It’s also clear to me that users, both in consumer and enterprise, will have access to some multi-agent framework for them, working all the time doing things. It feels like a moment of infinite possibilities. Sergey Brin said one of Argon’s core innovations was relying more on the model to help develop the model. Yet incidents involving OpenAI’s bots breaking containment and Google’s bots accessing a site they shouldn’t have suggest these systems still aren’t perfectly aligned. Isn’t there reasonable cause for concern about accelerating toward recursive self-improvement? There are three parts to your question. Let’s first talk about RSI itself. You’re right, Sergey mentioned RSI being a critical contributor as we are developing Argon. But to be very clear, today, in a continuum, we are pretty far from the end state of RSI or something like that. The right way to describe it is you have RSI loops along with AI researchers in various aspects of model development. You almost have agents helping AI researchers in some automated way work together to build these models. It’s good to at least understand where we are today, and it’s super exciting. I expect that continuum to keep making progress as we go into next year. The second question is around safety. Security comes from defense in depth. You’re talking about alignment, obviously. We all are doing a lot of work to make sure the models are as aligned as possible. But it’s an active area of research, and there are clear gaps. That’s not the only thing we rely on. You have the work you do on alignment, but beyond that, we put a lot of effort into real-time monitoring as these models are working. Making sure you have good telemetry into what’s happening so that you can intervene in real time if you see unexpected behaviors. How you do that, the architecture with which you do that, how you make sure it’s all sandboxed and isolated in a way that it can continue doing its job during real-time monitoring — these are all areas of investment. Obviously, when we deploy these models, giving customers, enterprises, control, both with real-time monitoring, but their ability to decide where they deploy, what type of data which models ever have access to, etc. All that work is very, very important, and we are doing a lot of that. As an industry, we need to constantly up our game and take the time to do all this stuff, including dedicating the compute required to make sure you can safely deploy these models. The third part is: Is it all enough? This is why there are a lot of conversations in the industry, and I think it’s reasonable to be worried. The right way to approach something you worry about is early on thinking about what more we can do. As an industry, you’re definitely seeing increased levels of work on alignment, testing for safety, etc., as we deploy these models. The next step would be developing better standards so there are cross-industry standards of how we do these things, including the ability to evaluate using independent evaluators. If you look at areas like financial controls, we have accounting standards, we have independent auditors. Those are all the next natural steps for us as an industry to work toward, and regulation will end up playing a role as we go through all of that as well. Google pursues both language models and world models, while some other AI companies like OpenAI have focused more heavily on LLMs as the path to AGI. Why is world-model research important to you? As humans, you obviously perceive the world around you, and you’re taking all those inputs. Making sure these models are able to understand the laws of physics, simulate the world in high fidelity. All that, I think, are key enabling blocks for intelligence. We are working across all possible applications of this. Take an area like robotics. It’s not an accident: If you look at embodied reasoning benchmarks, Argon is state of the art. That all comes from our experience building world models. Inherently, I would expect there will be architectures which will converge all of this in the future. But for us, we view this as, today, this jagged frontier that is intelligence. We want to be at the frontier of all the possible approaches, and that will help us both drive better research, better insights, and develop a much better AGI model, is how we think about it. Some people argue Google should focus on selling its computing resources rather than using them for AI research. Cloud wants to sell compute at a high markup, while researchers need a very big computer to build the best models. How do you balance those demands? Ground zero for us is making sure we are investing in the compute that’s needed to be at the AI frontier. In 2015, I set the company to be AI-first. AI is that key horizontal ingredient across everything we do, all the way from Search to Cloud to Waymo. That is ground zero for us, making sure both for research and developing the models that we have enough compute needed. Beyond that, we have these independent businesses which each have their own long-range plans. They’re using those long-range plans to project forward, and we plan for compute for all of them. The cloud team, they have a business and they have a projection and they have demand signals. They have committed contracts. With that help, we can plan on a long-term compute trajectory for them. We’re fortunate to have this wide set of opportunities. There’s no company in the world which isn’t making trade-offs at any given moment in time. But the first principles we operate on is making sure we have enough compute to invest in the frontier, and that’s non-negotiable, and everything else works on top. Remember, we are building our own compute, our own data centers. There are long lead times. The compute we have today is a function of decisions I made in 2024. Even if you think back to a year from today, last year the agentic coding takeoff hadn’t happened. Today, obviously, when you sit and look at anything, everyone is short—not just us, other companies—and everyone wishes you had two times what you had planned for. That comes with the territory. At any given moment in time, we are planning for what we would need two to three years out in the future. You’re going to find some decisions you make may look suboptimal two years out, depending on where the state of the art is. I don’t spend too much time thinking about it. The way I think about compute allocation is making sure Google DeepMind, both for research and frontier model development, is cutting edge in terms of compute access. After that, we plan for all our businesses. It’s great we can provide our compute to other people too, like we have done. It allows us to scale that up, get real tests for it in the widest application set possible, test it in the real world, and make sure we are at the cutting edge of technology at every layer of our AI stack as well. Ben Horowitz relayed on a podcast that Andy Jassy had said compute was sold out until 2028. Are you seeing the same thing? If today a customer is coming out and asking us for compute in ’27, that is incredibly difficult to do. Even last year we went out and leased some short-term compute to accommodate some customers and help them out. But yes, we are all dealing with similar timelines. Every major technology shift seems to involve overbuilding, from railroads to fiber. Do you think that’s happening here? It depends on the time frames you’re looking at. This level of build, if I take a long enough time frame, it makes complete sense to me. We are at early stages of the most consequential technology ever, and this is not like fiber. It’s not dark. We are using it. We are capacity constrained on a daily basis. The applications, the underlying technology is improving rapidly. But running a company, the way I work through the moment is you look at your demand signals. You look at your committed revenue opportunities that you’re getting in the form of contracts. You balance that with the underlying technical capability, or internally you balance how we are using it internally, the model trajectories. Based on all that, you take a disciplined approach—a confident, aggressive, but disciplined approach—to plan out compute. But when you talk about the broader economy as a whole, you’re having people operate with various levels of risk. I focus on what I can control as a company and plan through it. If your question is, can there be an overbuild? Yes, because you can have some constrained components. Remember, what matters is a set of everything you need to build out that compute. Memory, electricity, electricians…. Land. Like 2,000 components or more. You could get constrained at some point. There could be things which cause bottlenecks, and then you could have overbuilds. There could be external shocks to the economy. There are macro risks. All that is possible at any given time. But am I confident that the compute we are planning for, we will have uses for it given enough time? Absolutely, yes. I was in the room when you said AI would be as profound as fire and electricity. If you believe that, shouldn’t you give researchers the biggest possible computer, even at the expense of today’s cloud profits? We’re all doing some form of that. Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development. What you’re seeing is true already. But you want to be thoughtful. Even our AI researchers have some constraints, which are also good. That’s what inspires creativity. That’s what helps you come up with a more efficient algorithmic breakthrough, maybe to use less memory. What we are committed to is to invest what’s needed to stay at the frontier. OpenAI President Greg Brockman told me a few months ago that the ideal AI product might have no interface at all—just as natural as conversation. What do you think the interface looks like in the age of AI? Computing historically has been humans adapting to computing. With AI, it’ll be the other way around. The technology will adapt seamlessly to how humans live and go about their day-to-day life. You want to be able to speak to that AI when you want to. It has context. It can be persistently running somewhere, give you continuity. You’re not dealing with a lot of complexity. It’s natural. All that makes sense to me. That doesn’t mean it won’t have any interface, however. Nowadays, even on my phone, Gemini voice models are so good. I can just press the microphone button. I can just ramble. That’s why we call it Rambler. I can ramble. It intelligently corrects with my personal context. Even my friends’ names, weird names, it gets it right, even if it first guesses it wrong. It’s amazing. I’m not going in, backspacing, editing once I finish saying it. It’s remarkable how good it’s gotten. But there are going to be moments you will need an interface. You may want to entertain yourself. You may want to watch a video. You may ask your AI to create something, and you want to watch it, consume it. The way I think about it is, you want it to be as seamless and as natural as possible, and that you are not doing the hard work adapting to whatever the interface is. The technology is adapting to how you’re working at any given moment in time. When I asked Sam Altman about competition from Google, he argued that OpenAI was building AI-native products and implied Google was bolting AI onto existing ones. Do you accept that framing, and can a “bolt-on” compete with an AI-native product? First of all, it’s a very dynamic moment. We are all pushing each other. OpenAI has pushed us as a company too. This is not just we are doing something to them. Far from it. Yes, Google went into its own version of a code red too. In the AI moment, all of us have to respond with varying levels of urgency at any given moment in time. We are constantly building new products as well. Gemini was built from the ground up as a product—the Gemini app I’m talking about. Or tomorrow, as all of us are adapting to agents, are you bolting agents onto ChatGPT, or are they building it natively? How would you think about that? You can always put these questions back. I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as you want to build world-class product experiences that are AI-native and they are winning. Some of it is adapting products, some of it is rethinking new experiences. They will all be part of how you approach this moment. How do you expect to make money from these AI interfaces? If an agent recommends a product and I buy it, should it take a cut of the sale, even if that’s disclosed? I’m going to put enterprise aside. Consumers are going to increasingly value this technology. Take software developers today. Developers are willing to pay for these coding models because it really helps make them more productive. Nobody would want to code the way they were coding three years ago, or even the same time last year. When you’re delivering value, there’s value to be had. I’ve never seen examples where consumer products really scale to billions of users, where people are using it intensely, and haven’t had monetization to go along with it. If you’re providing value to people, there is inherent value to be had. The nature of it may change. You’re asking a scenario in which agents are doing stuff for you. At the end of the day, you will have commercial needs. The agents need to fulfill those commercial needs. The providers on the other side are going to see value in that. There’s going to be some mechanism by which it gets fleshed out. That’s what an efficient system does. But what matters is that you’re building those world-class consumer experiences. I promised myself one product feature request: Can you make Gemini-powered search in Gmail as good as searching Gmail through ChatGPT? What’s going on here? One of the exciting things we announced recently is the unified Gemini agent for enterprise, and we’re bringing that to consumers. These are persistent agents which run 24/7 in the cloud. We’re spinning up a micro VM effectively for every query, and from the runtime, the harness, the model—it’s all a headless service. It’ll work everywhere, and it has your context with you. You can address this agent whether you’re in Workspace, in Search, in Gemini. Agents are going to drive this unification from a customer experience, which people are looking for. When you have a broad product portfolio and you’re moving forward fast, there are always areas where you’re moving forward faster than some other areas. That’s valid feedback. But we are putting a lot of time and effort into making sure, as we build out our agentic experience, that unification and that capability works well across all these services. People have asked where Google’s equivalent of Muse or Dots is. Do you anticipate creating a new product to compete with them? Our goal with Gemini is to be a personal, proactive, and powerful assistant. That’s what we are working toward. You saw us describe the early versions of it at Google I/O this year with Spark. Effectively, already, if you open the Gemini app as a Pro or an Ultra user, you see Chat and Task, and they start giving you that agentic experience. With Argon now, that capability is dramatically accelerated. What we announced recently in our enterprise event, we are bringing that to consumers as well. Soon in Gemini, you will be able to ask something, and it’s a continuum. You don’t need to think about whether you’re asking a chat or an agentic task. It’ll just automatically do the right thing, and it can work persistently in the background securely and get things done for you. Already, empirically, when I look at what’s coming into Gemini in our app, last year you would have tagged them and most of them would have been chats. But a steadily growing percentage is already agentic tasks in Gemini. Yes, we are going to bring personal agents to our consumers. It’ll work in the Gemini app. It’ll work in Google Search. It’ll work in Gmail. You can address it, call it, etc. We want to make sure we’re getting it right. It’ll be powered by Argon, and we are very excited to bring it to our users. Google has invested and committed tens of billions of dollars to Anthropic. What do you see in Dario Amodei that makes you want such a deep investment and partnership? Very early on, when we looked at the founding team of Anthropic, it was very clear to us this was a world-class team which was involved in some of the earliest GPT models. We were quickly able to assess that they would be at the frontier. We’ve always tried to identify and partner with companies which would be at the cutting edge of technology. We’ve done that with SpaceX. We’ve done that with Anthropic. That’s what we saw, and we had a chance to partner. Is your partnership with Apple to license Gemini for Siri expanding, contracting, or standing still? For both us and Apple, that partnership was about translating the capabilities of AI into better experiences for users. I thought Apple has done a phenomenal job of incorporating—they customize these models and build it into Siri—and it’s been great to see the reception. We are committed to doing more. You’re going to do more with them? There’s nothing specific to comment, but it’s a partnership. It’s working well. What have you learned so far about the feasibility of data centers in space? It’s a very exciting project. Projects like this remind me—I still recall that moment in the desert for the DARPA Grand Challenge, watching the Stanley car compete in it, which ended up being the basis for Waymo. With all these technologies, you’re at a moment in time where it looks a bit like sci-fi, but 10 to 20 years down the line, it’s actually working in a meaningful way. I feel the same in space. We’ve always believed in betting big on these technologies. Quantum has been a great example of it. We’re probably 10 years into the journey. Waymo, we are almost 20 years into the journey. Space, we are two to three years into the journey. It’s clear to me that it’s an approach which will make a lot of sense in the future. Being in sub-synchronous orbits with 24/7 access to the most abundant form of energy we have access to will make a lot of sense for this exponential increase in compute that we are going to need. Having said that, this is a challenging project. The team has disciplined milestones. It was a super exciting milestone to send the TPUs up to space. Sometime, as we are speaking, we are expecting a “hello world” moment from them. I look forward to seeing that happen, and we’ll continue investing here too. You previously said 25% of the code written within Google was written by AI. What’s the number today? That number in our world today is meaningless in the sense that every part of what we now touch is influenced by AI deeply. What we are tracking with Argon, for example, it’s been a point of inflection. People are using Argon to really go tackle complex projects, including projects which affect millions of lines of code. In the four weeks since we have launched Argon, we have seen a 30% increase in CLs, and more importantly, almost a similar increase—a one-third decrease in rollbacks. People are writing code more productively and better code with it. We are tracking it with newer metrics now. How are you dealing with opposition to data centers? If you can’t build in the U.S. the way you want to, where else do you go? We’re very committed to building our data centers very responsibly. When I look at our largest data centers in some of the communities where we have been the longest, I visit them, I talk to people. There are people who come and tell us their kids have gone to college because of our investments in these communities, and we’ve grown in those communities. To me, this is about doing it right. Engaging with the communities early, doing it transparently. We are committed to making sure we are bringing incremental power, and we cover 100% of the cost of our power needs for these projects. It’s understanding the impact on neighborhoods and making sure you’re working thoroughly to address them. Done rightly, you can continue making progress. But we are constantly taking feedback into account. I do worry not everyone operates the same way. People have been surprised by data centers showing up in their backyard. Those are all important. As an industry, we should continue to do better. But part of the reason, in a 20-year time frame, we are thinking about things like data centers in space is making sure we are able to put these data centers where maybe the trade-offs will be different. What unproven area of AI is Google working hardest to crack? Is it continual learning—getting models to keep updating after release—or something else? There are multiple parallel paths. You saw with Argon we have a million output tokens. With our Gemini models early on, we had a one-million context window on the input side. These are all examples of breakthroughs we are constantly working on. How do you think about synthetic data? How do you think about continual learning? How do you think about more efficient architectures? We do dedicate a meaningful percentage of our compute to these research bets too. It always goes hand in hand, including our world models. Those are all bets we are placing. Sometimes, as part of these bets, there are ideas that emerge which just make their way into the mainline models. Maybe we don’t fully talk about it, but we have multiple steps in these areas. Working in technology requires optimism that building something will improve the world, but those bets can leave real consequences when they fail. I recently returned to a town in El Salvador where enthusiasm for Bitcoin had given way to unfinished construction and something resembling a ghost town. How do you maintain the optimism you spoke about in your Stanford commencement address while accounting for those risks? I genuinely have a deep conviction that improving technology and improving access to technology makes people’s lives better. It’s been my personal experience in my life, out of which comes that deep conviction, optimism. But with that, I’ve always felt humanity’s journey is always about working hard to harness that technology to make it work well for society. The optimism is not an optimism that you just build whatever you want, whenever. You work hard to make sure you’re building technology in the service of humanity, to make the human condition better. That’s got to be the defining goal as we are approaching it. With that framework, I’m very, very optimistic. We are in very early stages of the kind of progress that we are going to see on many areas. We’re all talking about areas like healthcare. A lot of the progress is ahead. The ability to make things in a fundamentally cheaper way on many things where things have been getting expensive for a long, long time, discovering new materials, etc., which really bend the curve—it’s tough to step today and understand the impact of all that, but they’re going to be very profound. I’m very optimistic, but we have to be rightfully concerned about all the ways this technology can go wrong. Sundar, I know you don’t do many of these. Thank you. Thanks, Alex. Appreciate it.
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