😹 DuckDuckGo installs up 30% after Google's AI overhaul

Welcome, humans.

This week on Reddit, someone dropped a video that made the thread go quiet. They recorded a video of a pathway then asked Gemini Omni to make it crowded. This is quite alarming. AI video has gotten good enough that you genuinely cannot tell whether thousands of people showed up to something, or whether someone just typed "massive crowd, stadium, 2026, high energy" into a prompt.

A guy on X pointed his phone at his laptop and prompted Gemini Omni to make the bird on his screen hop out onto his hand. No green screen. No editing. Just a phone, a laptop, and a model that apparently didn't get the memo about what's real.

The bird crossed over. So can anything else.

Gemini Omni is Google's new multimodal video model that takes text, images, audio, and existing footage and spits out short clips. It's quietly one of the most jaw-dropping announcements from Google I/O, and it's already sparking demos that make you do a double-take.

Here’s what happened in AI today:

• 🐱Google's AI search overhaul sent DuckDuckGo installs surging 30% as users flee AI-powered results.

• 📰Microsoft is building a Copilot super app that bundles all its AI tools in one place, targeting end of summer.

• 📰Developers refuse to work without AI, even though research suggests it may actually slow them down.

• 📰Huawei's chairman thanked the US for chip export controls, saying sanctions supercharged China's semiconductor industry.

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😺 With Google Pushing AI in Search, Everyone's Fleeing to DuckDuckGo

You've used Google Search the same way for 25 years. Type something, get a list of links, click one. That era just ended.

At Google I/O last month, the company announced it's replacing its traditional search box with an AI-powered conversational engine. Instead of a list of links, Google now serves up AI-generated answers first, with follow-up questions built in. It's calling it "the biggest upgrade to Search in over 25 years."

Not everyone is thrilled.

Here's what happened:

• DuckDuckGo saw US app installs jump an average of 18% week-over-week after Google's announcement, peaking at 30% growth on Memorial Day

• iPhone installs were even wilder, averaging 33% growth with a single-day peak of nearly 70%

• Traffic to DuckDuckGo's AI-free search page (noai.duckduckgo.com) grew 22.7% in the same window

• DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg put it plainly: "Google is force-feeding AI with no way to opt out. Their results are getting worse, not better."

DuckDuckGo wasn't the only one picking up strays. Brave Search and Kagi also saw traffic bumps in the same window. Even Bing has quietly grown from 2.8% to nearly 5% global market share since 2023, partly on the back of its Copilot integration. The pattern is the same everywhere: users who feel pushed around by Google are at least looking around.

Why this matters: To calibrate expectations, Google holds roughly 90% of global search. DuckDuckGo sits at about 2% in the US, processing around 100-145M searches a day vs Google's 8.5 billion. A 70% install spike is a loud signal in a very small room.

Google didn't engage directly with the criticism. Instead, a spokesperson pointed back to VP of Search Elizabeth Reid's I/O blog post, which makes the case that AI Mode now has 1 billion monthly users with queries doubling every quarter. Reid's framing is that this isn't a forced transition, it's users choosing AI search on their own. They also noted Google already offers a "web" filter for anyone who wants plain results with no AI.

The irony? DuckDuckGo has AI features too. They're just toggleable. Visit noai.duckduckgo.com and you get the 2005 internet experience with zero AI in sight.

Our take: Both things can be true at once. Google's AI search is genuinely popular at scale, and a real slice of users hate what it's become. The fight isn't over whether AI belongs in search. It's over who gets to decide how much. Google's answer is we do. DuckDuckGo's answer is you do.

Think of it as two funerals for search as we knew it. The first was when ads arrived and turned an honest list of links into a commercial battlefield, suddenly half the page was someone paying to be there. The second is happening now. AI doesn't just push ads at you, it skips the links entirely and hands you a pre-chewed answer. You're no longer searching. You're waiting. DuckDuckGo's surge is people realizing they miss the act of actually looking for something. But that version of search has been gone for a while. AI just held the second service.

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🎓 AI Skill of the Day: Your Free AI Marketing Team (No Hiring Required)

If you run a small business or do marketing work, Google just handed you a full branding toolkit and most people have no idea it exists.

Paul J. Lipsky's walkthrough covers Pomelli, a completely free Google tool that takes your product photos and spits out a brand kit, product shoot images, a full website, and social media campaigns, all from a few clicks. No agency. No budget. No Canva subscription.

Here's the basic workflow:

1. Go to labs.google.com/pomelli and click "Let's get started"

2. Drop in your website URL or upload 2-3 product photos to generate your Business DNA (fonts, colors, brand voice, tagline)

3. Add your product to the Catalog, then hit "Create photo shoot" to generate more product images with AI

4. Click "Websites" to auto-generate a full site based on your brand kit

5. Go to "Campaigns," select your product and aspect ratio, describe your promo (e.g. "4th of July, 20% off"), and Pomelli builds you 5 ready-to-post ad images — which you can also animate into videos

The whole thing takes about 15 minutes start to finish.

Example campaign prompt inside Pomelli:
"I'm running a [holiday] special. [X]% off. Create a campaign targeting [your audience]."

Total AI beginner? Start here (goes with this video).

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We sat down with Wen Sang, co-founder and COO of Genspark, to find out how the company went from AI search startup to $250M in annual revenue in under a year. We demo the product live on air, including a moment where the AI orders coffee on DoorDash in real time, and get into Wen's thesis on why legacy software is becoming infrastructure and AI agents are becoming the new layer between humans and work.

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📰 Around the Horn

• Microsoft is reportedly building a Copilot "super app" that bundles GitHub Copilot, Copilot Chat, and a new agentic feature called Autopilot into one interface, targeting a summer launch; fewer than 4.5% of its 450M Microsoft 365 customers currently subscribe to any Copilot features.

• Developers can no longer be persuaded to code without AI, even temporarily for research; the original 2025 METR study found AI actually slowed developers down 19%, Amazon killed its internal token-use leaderboard after employees gamed it, and Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget by April.

• Huawei's chairman publicly thanked the US for its chip export controls, saying the restrictions forced China to build its own semiconductor stack; Huawei has since unveiled a new chip architecture targeting cutting-edge transistor density by 2031, and Chinese chipmaker SMIC's shares jumped 7.6%.

• Anthropic closed a $65B funding round at a $965B valuation, making it the most valuable private AI company in the world, now ahead of OpenAI ($852B), with annualized revenues on track to cross $45B, up 5x from $9B at end-2024.

• Sam Altman announced OpenAI is hiring engineers to build actual robots, calling for "exceptional full-stack hardware, ops, systems, and ML engineers"; open roles include electrical engineer, actuator design engineer, and 3D printing lab technician, all based in San Francisco.

• Meta is reportedly developing an AI pendant you clip to your shirt or wear as a necklace that records and summarizes your conversations throughout the day, building on the Limitless startup it acquired last year; testing is expected to start in 2027.

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