PRODUCTS

Gemini 3.1 Pro ups performance, lowers cost curve

Just a few months after Gemini 3 shook the industry, Google’s back with another upgrade to its flagship model – and it runs cheaper than rival Anthropic's cutting-edge model. 

On Thursday, Google unveiled the preview of Gemini 3.1 Pro, the latest iteration in the Gemini series. Google’s model beats out Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT models in benchmarks related to reasoning, scientific knowledge, agentic terminal coding and tool use, and long-horizon professional tasks. 

Gemini 3.1 Pro can handle multimodal inputs, including text, images, audio, and video files, with a context window of up to 1 million tokens. Its outputs, meanwhile, are text-based and up to 64,000 tokens. In a post on X, Google called Gemini 3.1 Pro its “new baseline for complex problem solving.” 

The big news? Google’s model offers frontier capabilities at a lower cost than recent releases from rivals: 

• Gemini 3.1 Pro costs $2 per one million token input and $12 per one million token output. 

• Meanwhile, Claude Opus 4.6, Anthropic’s recently-released update to its flagship model, costs roughly $5 per million-token input and $25 per million-token output. It also undercuts Sonnet 4.6, Anthropic’s faster, mid-tier model,  which sits at $3 per million-token input and $12 per million-token output.

• Google’s latest model is competitively priced with OpenAI’s GPT-5.2, which costs slightly less at $1.75 per million-token input and slightly more at $14 per million-token output. 

Currently, Gemini 3.1 Pro is available in the Gemini app and NotebookLM for users with Google AI Pro and Ultra Plans. For developers, the model is now available via its suite of enterprise apps, including AI Studio, Antigravity, Vertex AI, Gemini Enterprise, Gemini CLI and Android Studio.

Google might shake out to be one of the biggest winners of the AI war, and not just because its models continue to break benchmarks. Though the Anthropic versus OpenAI rivalry is taking up a good deal of airtime, Google’s legacy in both the consumer and enterprise spaces gives it a foundation to better serve a larger number of users. Plus, if it’s able to undercut competitors at a time when AI costs are becoming stifling, Google not only has the opportunity to make models more accessible and democratized, but also to foster long-term progress. After all, decreasing cost curves tends to be one of the most powerful, although less flashy, ways to move the needle on innovation.

TOGETHER WITH QUEST

These Are The Biggest AI Bottlenecks

AI is proving it can do more than we ever thought possible, but there are still a few major constraints that limit its efficiency: Energy demands, hardware shortages and, perhaps most of all, data readiness. 

For many companies, their vast – and valuable – information is spread out, unorganized, and hard to understand. That’s no good… which is why Quest has decided to do something about it with the introduction of their Trusted Data Management Platform. This unified service automates five core data capabilities: Modeling, cataloging, governance, quality, and a marketplace, instantly allowing companies to not only better understand, but maximize their data usage. 

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WORKPLACE

Accenture pushes AI use, Google unveils cert

AI tools only matter if your employees actually use them, as many companies are learning the hard way. 

Consulting giant Accenture is now correlating promotions to use of its AI tools, aiming to encourage “regular adoption” of AI by making it a requirement to earn leadership roles, according to a report from the Financial Times. 

Confirming the report, Accenture told CNBC that, in order to be the “reinvention partner of choice” for its clients, consultants themselves must adopt “the latest tools and technologies to serve our clients most effectively.” 

It’s not the first time Accenture’s AI exuberance has impacted its workforce. 

• In September, the company laid off 11,000 employees as part of an AI-focused restructuring program. CEO Julie Sweet said that, as part of “upskilling our reinventors,” those who cannot be reskilled “will be exited.” 

• And further buying into the space, Accenture struck a multi-year agreement with Anthropic in December to train 30,000 of its professionals on AI and increase Claude adoption.

Accenture’s decision comes as companies sound the alarm on the gap between AI deployments and AI skills. One survey from Google and Ipsos found that, though 70% of managers see an urgent need for an AI-ready workforce, only 14% of workers have actually been offered AI training. 

To address the chasm between what we have and how we use it, Google on Thursday launched the Google AI Professional Certificate to its career certificate program. This gives its students training on how to practically use Google’s frontier models in enterprise settings, including use cases like building infographics, conducting deep research, turning goals into project plans with timelines and vibe coding custom apps, the company said in its announcement.

AI is creating a barrage of mixed messages in the workforce. Some reports push the narrative that AI is going to completely replace thousands of jobs, and is already primed to do so. Others, meanwhile, claim that AI is actually increasing workloads by democratizing the amount of tasks that the non-technical employee can do. Even though employers are largely pressuring employees to make good use of this technology, employees may feel as though they’re training their replacements. And while it’s too early to fully understand how AI will reshape the workforce, the pressure from stakeholders and C-suite executives could foster a looming sense of dread that the tech represents an existential threat to employees' livelihoods.

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COMMENTARY

Goodbye virtual assistant, hello AI chief of staff

For over a decade, the tech industry has been racing to create the perfect virtual assistant. Now, the goal is rapidly shifting due to AI agents. The new north star is to create an AI chief of staff.

So, what's the difference, and what does that look like? 

Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and countless other virtual assistants have been trying to cozy up to us for over a decade, automating tasks and reducing the number of steps to get things done. But they've mostly been pretty disappointing, limited to little more than announcing the weather, setting cooking timers, and helping dictate messages.

The new AI agent boom, led by Claude Code / Claude Cowork and OpenClaw, has changed the equation in just the past two months. Even just a few weeks ago, we were talking about how these new tools were finally launching the era of true "personal AI agents" that can perform routine tasks on our behalf. 

But the concept has advanced even further in recent weeks, especially driven by the OpenClaw community. The enthusiasts who are spinning up OpenClaw instances are racing ahead, giving us a picture of the future of agents. They have rapidly gone from trying to create super-smart, widely skilled agents to orchestrating teams of agents, each with dedicated strengths and specific capabilities, not unlike human teams. For many of these folks, they now have a stack of Mac minis running multiple agents and sub-agents.

And that's where a different concept has now emerged: the AI chief of staff.

I first heard it from Jason Calacanis on This Week in Startups, where Calacanis was recently speaking to Mitesh Agrawal of Positron AI and said, "This is going to save you inbox management [and] Slack management. These are the chores that you typically, as CEO, would hire a chief of staff [or] an executive assistant to do. You've now used an OpenClaw agent to do [it]."

Agrawal reported that it's saving him an average of at least 30 minutes per day. Calacanis pointed out that's over 3 hours per week (for a startup founder) and 150 hours per year, which is the equivalent of getting 3 extra weeks per year. That kind of time savings compounds over time, and it's likely to accelerate as the technology improves and gets easier for more people to access. 

Another concept Calacanis used to understand the power of this chief of staff phenomenon was to view it as democratizing services previously available only to the ultra-wealthy. He compared it to the way Uber can act like your personal chauffeur, Airbnb can function like having vacation homes in beautiful cities around the world, and JSX can make it feel like having a private jet. A chief of staff is someone who knows your needs and preferences and can act independently to make important tasks happen on your behalf. It was previously something limited to presidents, heads of state, and CEOs. That's a lot for AI agents to live up to. But if they can pull it off, it will become one of the most powerful upgrades to everyday life that the current AI boom can deliver.

LINKS

• Google's Demis Hassabis warns of deadly AI risks at India summit

• AMD to backstop $300 million Crusoe loan from Goldman for AI chips

• ByteDance is building out its US-based Seed AI team

• In India, Altman says the world urgently needs AI regulation 

• Anthropic could surpass OpenAI in revenue by mid-2026 

• Nvidia’s Jensen Huang teases "world-surprising" new chip ahead of GTC

• Pollen: A platform for building customer experience AI agents, surfacing churn risk and upsell signals to keep relationships without increasing headcount. 

• FullSeam: An agentic finance and accounting teammate to handle all of your routine tasks. 

• Visibl: A coordination layer for chip design, cutting development time from years to weeks. 

• Clawi.ai: An easier way to leverage your private OpenClaw assistants in the cloud. Runs in WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord.

• Applied AI Engineer: Production ML systems, LLM integration and enterprise deployment

• Forward Deployed Engineer: Technical implementation specialist, enterprise AI deployments

• ML Research Engineer: PhD in Computer Science, model architecture optimization

• RLHF Specialist: Post-training expert, human feedback integration for frontier models

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