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- Gemini 3.1 Pro: A Massive Leap in Reasoning and Real-World Tasks
Gemini 3.1 Pro: A Massive Leap in Reasoning and Real-World Tasks
PLUS: Ambani's Reliance Commits $110 Billion Investment to AI, Prime Minister Modi Pitches India as the Next Global AI Hub and more.
Wes Roth
February 20, 2026
In partnership with
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Today:
GEMINI 3.1 PRO is the new era…
Google has launched Gemini 3.1 Pro, a sharper thinking core for its AI family. In three months, its score on Arc AGI-2, a test of abstract reasoning, jumped from 31 to 77 percent. New tests now spotlight useful work: BrowseComp checks web-search skill, Apex Agents judges office tasks, TerminalBench rates use of a text-command system, and Toa-2 measures friendly teamwork with people.
Gemini 3.1 Pro leads the first three tests and sits just behind Claude Opus 4.6 in conversation help. The leap shows fast progress toward AI that can shoulder real, tedious jobs now handled by humans. OpenAI benchmarks provide key comparison points.
For the past few years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been the undisputed kings of AI. But what if they aren't the path to true superintelligence?
David Silver, the legendary former DeepMind researcher who gave us AlphaGo and AlphaZero, certainly thinks we need a new approach. He just raised a staggering $1 billion seed round—the largest ever for a European startup—led by Sequoia Capital to launch his new company, Ineffable Intelligence. The pre-money valuation? A cool $4 billion. For a seed round!
Why is this so fascinating? Silver is betting entirely on reinforcement learning and "world models." Instead of training on massive datasets of human-written text (which has a ceiling), his AI systems will learn autonomously through trial and error—experiencing the world much like humans and animals do. If he succeeds, this could completely rewrite the blueprint for how we build artificial general intelligence. It's a massive pivot from the current status quo, and definitely the most intellectually exciting news of the week.
Just when you thought startup valuations couldn't get any wilder, OpenAI is reportedly finalizing a new funding round that is on track to top $100 billion. Yes, you read that with a "B".
With backing expected from heavyweights like Amazon, SoftBank, Nvidia, and Microsoft, this deal would push OpenAI's valuation past the $850 billion mark. To put that into perspective, that makes OpenAI more valuable than most of the legacy tech giants we grew up with.
Why do they need a hundred billion dollars? Infrastructure. We are entering the era of trillion-dollar computing build-outs. OpenAI knows that to maintain their edge and train the next generation of models, they need an unprecedented amount of compute power. It’s no longer just a software race; it’s a capital-intensive hardware and energy war.
While the industry looks toward future paradigms, Google has been quietly iterating on the present. They just rolled out Gemini 3.1 Pro, and the benchmark leaps are nothing short of phenomenal.
Built on their latest Gemini 3 architecture, 3.1 Pro is specifically designed for complex problem-solving where a simple chatbot answer just won't cut it. It scored a verified 77.1% on the notoriously difficult ARC-AGI-2 benchmark (more than double the reasoning performance of Gemini 3 Pro).
But what does that mean for you and me? It’s all about "vibe coding" and agentic workflows. The model is now incredibly adept at taking a complex prompt and generating entire immersive experiences—like coding a dynamic 3D simulation of a starling murmuration or building animated, scalable vector graphics directly into a codebase. It's rolling out in preview across the Gemini API, Vertex AI, and Google's new agentic IDE, Antigravity. If you're a developer or a creator, your toolkit just got a massive upgrade.
🧠RESEARCH
When AI chatbots get facts wrong, we often assume they simply do not know the answer. However, a new study reveals that top AI models actually have 95% of facts securely stored in their memory, but struggle to retrieve them. Allowing the AI extra time to "think" greatly improves its memory recall.
Researchers created DreamZero, a powerful AI that helps robots understand how the physical world works by watching and predicting videos. Instead of needing repetitive instructions, the AI learns movement naturally. This allows robots to double their success rate when facing completely new tasks or working in unfamiliar physical environments.
Most smart digital assistants fail to adjust when your personal tastes change over time. A new approach gives these agents a dedicated memory system to learn from live conversations. By asking clarifying questions and remembering your feedback, the AI quickly adapts to your unique habits and updates its behavior automatically.
📲SOCIAL MEDIA
🗞️MORE NEWS
Reliance Industries' $110 Billion Investment Reliance Industries plans to invest $110 billion over the next seven years into artificial intelligence. The company will use the money to build massive data centers and powerful computing systems across India. Chairman Mukesh Ambani hopes this giant project will make smart technology affordable and easily available to everyone in the country.
India's Push to Become a Global Tech Hub Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently promoted India as a future center for global artificial intelligence. He believes the country's success with everyday digital tools can serve as a blueprint for bringing cheap technology to developing nations. Despite this ambitious goal, India still struggles to build its own advanced computer models due to a lack of expensive computer chips.
Measuring How Programs Act on Their Own Researchers studied how humans work with smart computer programs that can perform tasks by themselves without being prompted. They found that people give these programs more freedom to act as they get used to them, but they also step in to correct them more often. The study concludes that tech companies need better ways to watch over these tools once they are released to the public.
The Pushback Against Massive Tech Facilities Local communities across the United States are protesting the rapid construction of massive buildings meant to power new technology. Residents are angry about the huge amounts of electricity and water these buildings consume, as well as the loud noise they make. This growing movement highlights a major clash between the goals of big tech companies and the well-being of everyday neighborhoods.
Software Glitch Raises Privacy Fears A recent software glitch in Microsoft's smart work assistant has sparked serious privacy worries among its users. The error caused the tool to accidentally read and summarize highly confidential emails that it was not supposed to see. This alarming mistake shows how hard it is to keep private information secure when adding new technology to office software.
Google's Partnership for Smart Shopping Google is teaming up with a Southeast Asian tech company to add new computer features to video games and online stores. The two companies will build a smart shopping helper for the popular Shopee app to make buying items easier for customers. This partnership proves that tech giants want their computer models to do helpful daily chores rather than just answer simple questions.
The Difficulty of Spotting Fake Faces A recent study shows that people are far too confident in their ability to spot fake human faces created by computers. Because the technology has improved so rapidly, the obvious visual mistakes we used to rely on are completely gone. The newest fake faces actually look too perfect and balanced, which makes them incredibly hard to tell apart from real photos.
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