Google on Tuesday showed off new plans to turn its famous search bar into an AI assistant that can book restaurants, track news, and contact businesses—just by asking a question.

When College of Natural Resources and Environment geospatial data scientist Junghwan Kim asked an artificial intelligence (AI) image generator to create a picture of Blacksburg, the result wasn't quite right. "The image looked generic," Kim said. "It didn't capture what makes Blacksburg unique."

Even advanced technology can struggle when the real world becomes unpredictable. In April 2026, a Waymo robotaxi in San Antonio, Texas, drove into a flooded lane during severe weather, prompting the company to recall about 3,800 vehicles for a software fix.

Patrick Traynor, Ph.D., has questions. When the professor and interim chair of the University of Florida Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering saw reports in the media positing that scientific literature is increasingly being generated by artificial intelligence, he wondered, "How do they know?"

A research team at Google co-led by Michael Brenner, Catalyst Professor of Applied Mathematics and Physics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Google research scientist, has produced a new artificial intelligence system that can automatically write scientific software programs that surpass the performance of human-written programs. The paper is published in the journal Nature.