Tech Brew Ride Home - Gemini 3, And Meta Beats The Government

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

Tons of things today. Google’s new Gemini 3 model. Signs the “second tier” of AI startups is starting to get product market fit. The EU has announced that watering down of GDPR that was rumored. And will Meta’s big win against the government mean mergers and acquisitions are back on the tech menu? Google is launching Gemini 3, its ‘most intelligent’ AI model yet (The Verge) AI Music Platform Suno Valued at $2.45 Billion (WSJ) TikTok will let you choose how much AI-generated content you want to see (TechCrunch) Europe is scaling back its landmark privacy and AI laws (The Verge) Meta Did Not Violate Antitrust Law, Judge Rules (NYTimes) Meta’s Victory Opens the Way for Silicon Valley to Go Deal Shopping (NYTimes) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the Techrewrite home for Wednesday, November 19th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, tons of things. Google's new Gemini 3 model signs the second tier of AI startups are starting to get product market fit. The EU has announced that watering down of GDPR that was rumored and will Meta's big win against the government mean mergers and acquisitions are back on the tech menu. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Conducting business online can feel a little scary these days, especially with AI, creating new opportunities for fraud. In fact, Sellant estimates that AI was behind roughly 20% of the fraud perpetrated last year. Spotting bad agentic AI while allowing good agents to continue with their tasks isn't easy. Thankfully, Momoto Continuous Captcha can spot malicious agents pretending to be people at the point of account creation or registration. Unlike past Captcha solutions, it runs behind the scenes with no puzzles for users. As mentioned, I'm an investor. in Momoto through the Ride Home Fund, and Momoto is offering TechBrew Ride Home listeners

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the rocky launch of GPT5, potentially putting the company at the forefront of consumer-focused AI models. For the first time, Google is giving everyone access to its new flagship AI model Gemini 3 Pro in the Gemini app on day one. It's also rolling out Gemini 3 Pro to subscribers inside search. Tulsi Doshi, Google's Deep Mind Senior Director and Head of Product, says the new model will bring the company closer to making information universally accessible and useful as its search engine continues to evolve. I think the one really big step in that direction is to step out of the paradigm of just text responses and give you a much richer, more complete view of what you can actually see.

Gemini 3 Pro is natively multimodal, meaning it can process text, images, and audio all at once, rather than handling them separately. As an example, Google says Gemini 3 Pro could be used to translate photos of recipes and then transform them into a cookbook, or it could create interactive flashcards based on a series of video lectures. You'll spot some of these improvements across Google's suite of products, including the Gemini app where you can build more full-featured programs inside the built-in workspace, canvas, The upgraded AI model will also enable generative interfaces, a tool Google is testing in Gemini Labs

that allows Gemini 3 Pro to create a visual magazine-style format with pictures you can browse through or a dynamic layout with a custom user interface tailored to your prompt. Gemini 3 Pro in AI mode, the AI-powered Google Search feature will similarly present you with visual elements like images, tables, grids, and simulations based on your query. It's also capable of performing more searches using an upgraded version of Google's query fan-out technique, which now not only breaks down questions into bits it can search for on your behalf, but is better at understanding intent to help find new content that it may have previously missed, according to Google's announcement.

Google is also not so subtly jabbing at OpenAI describing Gemini 3 Pro as less prone to the type of empty flattery, espoused by chat GPT. Doshi says you'll see noticeable changes in Gemini, 3 Pro's responses, which Google describes as offering a smart, concise, and direct trading cliche and flattery for genuine insight, telling you what you need to hear, not just what you want to hear. The company says it also shows reduced sycifancy and issue opening I had to address with chat GPT earlier this year. Along with these improvements, Gemini 3 Pro comes with better reasoning and agentic capabilities, allowing it to complete more complex tasks and reliably plan ahead

over longer horizons, according to Google. The AI model is powering an experimental Gemini agent feature that can perform tasks on your behalf inside the Gemini app, such as reviewing and organizing emails or researching and booking travel. Gemini 3 Pro now sits at the top of L.M. Arena's leaderboard, a popular platform used for benchmarking AI models. A deep think mode enhances the model's reasoning capabilities even further, though it's currently only available to safety testers.

Gemini 3 Pro is available inside the Gemini app for everyone starting today, while Google AI Pro and ultra subscribers in the U.S. can try out Gemini 3 Pro inside AI mode by selecting thinking from the model drop down. Gemini Agent is rolling out first to AI Ultra subscribers, end quote. By the way, Google says the Gemini app now has 650 million monthly active users up from 350 million back in March, and it powers Google's searches, conversational AI mode. And not only did Gemini 3 Pro score a 1501 on LM Arena's text arena becoming number one on that benchmark, as mentioned, Google said it showed PhD-level reasoning with top humanity's last exam and GPQA diamond scores. As far as using this to

build off of, Gemini 3 Pro is priced at $2 to $4 per 1 million input tokens and $12 to $18 per 1 million output tokens cheaper than Claude Sun at 4.5, but more expensive than GPT 5.1. There's also one more thing. Antigravity. An agent-first coding tool that leverages Gemini 3-Pro and third-party models in free public preview for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. Quoting the verge again. Google says that anti-gravity, which supports multiple agents and gives them direct access to the editor, terminal, and browser is designed for an agent-first future. One of the key components of anti-gravity is how it reports on its own work. As it completes tasks, it will produce what Google calls artifacts, task lists, plans, screenshots, and browser recordings

that are intended to verify both the work it's done and what it will do. Antigravity will also report on its actions and external tool use along the way, but Google says that artifacts are easier for users to verify than full lists of a model's actions and tool calls. Anti-gravity's other big change is that it offers two main usage views. The default editor view offers a familiar integrated development environment, the IDEE experience, similar to rivals like cursor and GitHub co-pilot, with an agent in a side panel. The new manager view is instead designed for controlling multiple agents at once, allowing each to work more autonomously. Google compares it to mission control for spawning, orchestrating, and observing multiple agents across multiple workspaces

in parallel. Google has introduced more ways to give feedback to AI. Google has introduced more ways to give feedback to AI agents as they work, with the ability to leave comments on specific artifacts for an agent to take into account without breaking up its work to do so. The company also says that agents in Antigravity will be able to learn from past work, retaining specific snippets of code or the steps required to carry out certain tasks. Antigravity is available in a public preview now, compatible with Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It's free to use with what Google calls generous rate limits for Gemini 3 Pro, though it also supports Claude's Sun at 4.5 and opening AI's GPTOSS. Google says rate limits refresh every five hours, and that only a very small

fraction of power users will ever hit the limits, end quote. I want to take a second to note the fact that I'm starting to see a steady stream of not the big players, but some of the second tier, sometimes even niche players in AI, the ones building off of the big AI models to do specific things, starting to get some traction in terms of revenue. I'm thinking of things like 11 Labs and runway, and here's another one. AI music platform, Suno, has raised $250 million led by Menlo Ventures at a $2.45 billion valuation up from around $500 million in terms of valuation last year, and says its annual revenue has now reached $200 million. Quoting the journal,

The company offers free and paid tiers to make artificial intelligence-generated music. Suno has a mobile app and recently released an audio workstation with professional-grade editing tools. Suno co-founder and chief executive Mikey Schulman said the company's aim is to bring interactive music tools to the average person. There is a really big future for music where way more people are doing it in a really active way and where it has a much more valuable place in society, he said. AI music platforms have drawn controversy and legal conflicts in the music industry. Record labels are navigating how to embrace AI as a creative tool while protecting copyrighted work. The three biggest record label companies, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Group,

sued Suno and another AI music platform UDio, with claims that the AI companies use copyrighted music scraped from the internet to train their models. Last month, Universal and UDio settled their litigation. and announced an agreement that UDio would introduce a new platform trained on licensed songs. The new subscription service to be launched next year would allow fans to create and share music within the UDio platform, the company said. In response to the lawsuit, Suno has said its technology was creating new content rather than copying existing content, end quote. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

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manage topics tool, which lets users choose what they see on TikTok. The move comes as companies like OpenAI and meta are embracing AI-only feeds. September, Meta released Vives, a new feed for sharing and creating short AI-generated videos. A few days after Meta's launch, OpenAI, released SORA, a social media platform for creating and sharing AI-generated videos. Since Sora's launch, realistic AI-generated videos have been posted to TikTok. Additionally, many TikTok users are leveraging AI to create visuals for posts about other topics like history or celebrities. TikTok says that with the new AI-generated content control, Users who want to see less of this sort of content can now dial things down, while those who

enjoy it can choose to see more of it. You can access the new capability by going into your settings, selecting content preferences, and then clicking the manage topics option. Then you can move the slider for different topics, including AI generated content, to adjust how much you do or don't want to see that sort of content in your For You feed. The change is rolling out in the coming weeks, TikTok says, but to improve. its ability to label AI-generated content. TikTok is now also testing a technology called invisible watermarking. TikTok already requires people to label realistic AI-generated content and uses a cross-industry technology called content credentials from C2PA, which embeds metadata

into content that lets it and other platforms know when something is AI-generated. However, TikTok notes that these labels can be removed when content is re-uploaded or edited on other platforms with the new invisible watermarks. TikTok will add another layer of safeguards by using a watermark that only it can read. That means it'll be harder for others to remove it, end quote. The EU has unveiled its proposed updates to GDPR, including simplifying cookie, permission pop-ups, and plans to water down the AI Act after U.S. and tech company pressure. Quoting The Verge,

after years of staring down the world's biggest tech companies and setting the bar for tough regulation worldwide, Europe has blinked. Under intense pressure from industry and the U.S. government, Brussels is stripping protections from its flagship, general data protection regulation, GDPR, including simplifying its infamous cookie permission pop-ups and relaxing or delaying landmark AI rules in an effort to cut red tape and revive sluggish economic growth. The change is proposed by the European Commission, the bloc's executive branch, changes core elements of the GDPR, making it easier for companies to share anonymized and pseudonymized personal data sets. They would allow AI companies to legally use personal data to train AI models so long as that training complies with other GDPR requirements.

The proposal also waters down a key part of Europe's sweeping artificial intelligence rules, the AI Act, which came into force in 2024, but had many elements that would only come into effect later. The change extends the grace period for rules governing high-risk AI systems that pose, quote, serious risks to health, safety, or fundamental rights, which were due to come into effect next summer. The rules will now only apply once it's confirmed that the needed standards and support tools are available to AI companies. One change that's likely to please almost everyone is a reduction in Europe's ubiquitous cookie banners and pop-ups. Under the new proposal, some non-risk cookies won't trigger pop-ups at all, and users would be able to control

others from central browser controls that apply to websites broadly. Other amendments in the new digital omnibus include simplified AI documentation requirements for smaller companies, a unified interface for companies to report cybersecurity incidents, and centralizing oversight of AI into the Block's AI office, end quote. Finally today, bigger news than I would usually put at the bottom of a show. This could have led the show on any other day. But a U.S. judge has ruled that meta's Instagram and WhatsApp acquisition don't violate antitrust law as the FTC failed to prove the deals let Meta monopolize the market.

Quoting the Times, Judd's James E. Boesberg of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, said in an 89-page ruling that Meta did not create a monopoly in social networking through the acquisitions and that the market has continued to expand with rivals, including TikTok and YouTube. The Federal Trade Commission had sued the company accusing it of breaking antitrust law by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp in a buy-or-berry strategy to cement its social networking dominance. The FTC, quote, continues to insist that meta competes with the same old rivals it has had for the last decade, that the company holds a monopoly among that small set and that it maintained that monopoly through anti-competitive acquisitions, Judge Boasberg said, adding that the agency needed to prove that argument.

The court's verdict today determines that the FTC has not done so, the judge wrote. The case, Federal Trade Commission v. Meta platforms stemmed from a novel legal argument that Meta, which was known as Facebook at the time, bought Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion in WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion to kill off its competitors. The government's lawsuit filed nearly five years ago, argued that meta violated Section 2 of the 135-year-old Sherman Antitrust Act, a federal law that prohibits the monopolization of an industry through anti-competitive practices. The odds were against the government legal experts said, because it had the difficulty of proving a hypothetical that meta would not have been so dominant if it hadn't acquired the rival apps. On Tuesday, Mr. Bozberg cited with Meta saying the company does compete with rival apps like YouTube and TikTok. He emphasized how quickly technology has changed since the FTC filed suit. Facebook and Instagram have transformed to primarily show users short unconnected videos recommended by algorithms, Mr. Bozberg wrote in his opinion. Both apps are pushing still further in that direction.

The decision to define the social media market broadly could leave little room for the FTC to appeal the decision because higher courts will likely defer to Mr. Boseberg's view, some legal experts said. It is a decisive win for META, said Rebecca Haw-Allonsworth, professor of law at Vanderbilt University. It takes the wind out of the sales of the government antitrust suits against big tech for sure, end quote. Indeed, the chatter online is that meta's win over the FTC case may be a win for all, may mean meta, Google, Google Microsoft at all can resume buying startups to stay ahead of the pack. Quoting the Times. The meta-antitrust ruling will eliminate a lot of the gymnastics that the major acquirers are going through and it should really open the door for more deals, said Tomaz Tanguze,

a general partner at the venture capital firm Theory Ventures. Since President Trump's inauguration, some tech companies have been hopeful that regulators would be more friendly toward deals. Venki Ganassan, a partner at the Venture Capital firm Menlo Ventures, said Tuesday's ruling in the meta-antitrust case would help with that. The thing that most people are happy about is the clarity, he said. Tech markets hate uncertainty. Strange deal structures may no longer be required for tech companies to get their hands on hot AI assets, added Samuel N. Weinstein, a professor of law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. It could be that they'll look at this

decision and the Trump administration generally and think, we don't have to do this anymore because we don't have to hide what we're doing, he said, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Levato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavah Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino,

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