Google is retiring Gems, its tool for building custom versions of Gemini, and replacing it with "Skills." The new feature is rolling out to Gemini chat users worldwide. With this change, Google joins OpenAI and Anthropic in moving away from personalized chatbots and toward reusable instruction packages that an AI system can call on when needed.
Gems were Google's answer to OpenAI's Custom GPTs. OpenAI is also phasing those out. The format replacing them did not come from Google or OpenAI. Skills started at Anthropic and are now published as an open standard.
What a Skill actually is
A Skill is a detailed prompt written for a specific task. Users can draft one themselves, or have Gemini help write and refine it. The goal is to store instructions you would otherwise retype often, and then call them up on demand.
ElevenLabs, the voice AI company behind some of the most realistic synthetic speech on the market, is now valued at $22 billion. The company has not raised new growth capital to get there. The figure comes from a $300 million tender offer that lets employees sell part of their vested shares to outside investors.
The new number is twice the $11 billion valuation ElevenLabs reached in February, when it raised $500 million. That gap closed in roughly seven months.
What the deal actually is
A tender offer is a structured way for a private company's shareholders, usually staff, to sell existing shares to new buyers. The money goes to the people selling, not into the company's bank account. That makes it different from a funding round, but it still sets a price per share, and therefore an implied valuation.
OpenAI has signed a multi-year strategic partnership with Synopsys to build a specialized AI model for chip design. The model is called GPT-Synopsys. The aim is to give semiconductor engineers a system that understands design work and can run the industry's design software directly.
The deal pairs a frontier AI lab with one of the established vendors in chip design software. Both companies are now testing whether a language model can take on part of the work of an experienced chip engineer.
Who Synopsys is
Synopsys sells electronic design automation (EDA) tools. Engineers use this software to design computer chips and other semiconductors. EDA covers much of the work between a chip concept and a manufacturable product, including design and verification, which checks that a design behaves as intended before it is built.
Google has a new flagship model, and it is not being released to everyone. Alphabet, Google's parent company, has introduced Gemini 4 Argon, a general-purpose model that covers coding, research and writing. Google is putting most of its emphasis on one area, though: cybersecurity.
Access is restricted for now. Argon is going only to a small group of Google's cyber partners through the Fairwind Program, the company's security initiative. Google says it trained the model specifically for defensive cyber work and claims it can "autonomously find, validate, and patch critical software vulnerabilities."
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