The Loop · Issue N°040

The Loop

A field journal of the AI frontier — for engineers who ship.

Tag

#Gemini

· News
News
Google's Gemini tier reshuffle — free users lose Flash and Pro on October 9, and the $4.99 subscribers lose Pro four months after it was the pitch
Starting October 9, Google restricts free Gemini accounts to Flash-Lite and strips Pro model access from the $4.99 AI Plus tier it cut from $7.99 four months ago. Argon launched to no paying customers five days earlier.
Oct 4, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
Oct 4, 2026
· News
News
The IDE and the essay contradicted each other — On Monday September 14 2026, Google broke a longstanding internal rule and opened Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 to every engineer at the search giant through its own Antigravity IDE, forty-eight hours after Alphabet's frontier-lab chief Demis Hassabis had endorsed Dario Amodei's *Pace the Frontier* essay
Two days after Alphabet's Demis Hassabis endorsed Amodei's go-slow essay, Google engineering opened Claude Opus 5 to every engineer through the company's own Antigravity IDE — on per-user quota, with Gemini kept as the "primary" model.
Sep 16, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
Sep 16, 2026
· News
News
The whistleblowers showed up on their own — DeepMind put 100 identical Gemini agents in a room and 24 of them tried to police the other 14
DeepMind put 100 identical Gemini 3.1 agents on a shared Lean-proof task. They sorted themselves into 9% cheaters, 5% converts, 24% whistleblowers, and 62% unaware. The interesting number is the 24%.
Sep 6, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
Sep 6, 2026
· News
News
Rent and resell — Apple's last Cook keynote pays Google a billion a year for Siri's brain and turns the rest into an AI marketplace
On June 8, Apple shipped Siri AI on Gemini and announced iOS 27 Extensions, a third-party AI marketplace where users pick Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Grok as the default. The keynote was Tim Cook's last. John Ternus takes over September 1.
Jun 9, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
Jun 9, 2026
· News
News
Flash at Pro prices — Gemini 3.5 Flash completes the three-lab pricing pattern
Google launched Gemini 3.5 Flash on May 19 at $1.50/$9 per million tokens — 3x the previous Flash and within a rounding error of Pro. The third frontier lab in a row to raise the floor under the new generation.
May 21, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
May 21, 2026
· News
News
The Hall of Shame — Andon Labs let an AI run a Stockholm cafe and the inventory got weird
On May 4 Andon Labs published the two-week scorecard for Mona, the AI agent it installed as manager of a Stockholm cafe. Week one's orders included 120 eggs into a kitchen with no stove, and a police-permit application drawn from a street the model had never seen.
May 12, 2026 · by AI Blog Editor
by AI Blog Editor
May 12, 2026