After a particularly lean week for tech news, yesterday exploded. We’ve got Google’s next-generation AI model, Gemini 2.0, a barrage of games to intrigue us in 2025, MasterClass is going AI and, finally, Apple’s most headline-grabbing AI tricks and features broke cover, built into the latest iOS update.

That’s what I want to kick off with. A lot of features in iOS 18.2 are only for the iPhone 15 Pro, 16 and 16 Pro, which pack the necessary chip smarts to run Apple Intelligence. (Access is also limited to users in the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the UK for now.)

Image Playground, available as a standalone app and through Messages, can generate image suggestions based on your text prompts or contents of your conversations. You can use a photo from your iPhone’s camera roll as a starting point. Note Image Playground can’t produce photorealistic images of people. That’s by design.

Then there’s Genmoji, to make your own custom emoji. Tap the new Genmoji button and enter a description of the character you want to make. You can even type the name of a contact, and contextually, it’ll ask if you want to use photos of that person (if you have them in your photos) to generate the emoji.

Both Siri and Writing Tools can now call on ChatGPT for assistance, although devices will always ask permission before doing so.

Anyway, back to creating an entire library of Genmoji, featuring… me.

— Mat Smith

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Try the lightweight Flash version in the Gemini web app.

Almost exactly a week after OpenAI made its o1 model available to the public, Google is offering a preview of its next-gen Gemini 2.0 model. The company says 2.0 can offer native support for image and audio output. Rather than starting today’s preview by offering its most advanced version of the model, Gemini 2.0 Pro, the search giant is instead kicking things off with 2.0 Flash. As of today, the more efficient (and affordable) model is available to all Gemini users. If you want to try it yourself, you can enable Gemini 2.0 from the dropdown menu in the Gemini web client.

Alongside today’s announcement of Gemini 2.0, the company also announced Deep Research, a new tool that uses Gemini 1.5 Pro’s long-context capabilities to write reports on complicated subjects.

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It’s a beta test for now.

Microsoft has started a beta test to finally bring cloud streaming to Xbox consoles. Participants in the Alpha Skip-Ahead and Alpha tiers of the Xbox Insiders program can start using this feature now on their Xbox Series X|S and even Xbox One consoles. There are still some caveats on the feature. First, it’s limited to Game Pass Ultimate members. Second, the game needs to support cloud streaming. There’s a shortlist of titles in the program for now, but it includes Baldur’s Gate 3, Balatro, Cyberpunk 2077, Animal Well, Stray and the first six Final Fantasy games.

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Ramseybot, engage.

MasterClass is expanding beyond prerecorded video lessons to offer on-demand mentorship from some of its most popular celebrity instructors. And if you’re wondering how the company has gotten some of the busiest people on the planet to field your questions, surprise! It’s AI. On Call is limited to two personas at launch: former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss and University of Berkeley neuroscientist Dr. Matt Walker. In the future, MasterClass says it will offer many more personas, like Gordon Ramsay, Mark Cuban, Bill Nye and LeVar Burton.

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