Welcome back to Daily Zaps, your regularly-scheduled dose of AI news ⚡️ 

Here’s what we got for ya today:

• Google’s new productivity agent “CC”

• Google’s view on AGI

• Microsoft’s view on AGI

• The new ChatGPT Images is here

Let’s get right into it!

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PRODUCTIVITY

Google’s new productivity agent “CC”

Google has introduced CC, an experimental AI productivity agent built with Gemini that consolidates information from Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive into a single “Your Day Ahead” email each morning, giving users a personalized briefing that links schedules, messages, tasks, and documents. Unlike a static digest, CC acts as a two-way assistant that users can reply to in natural language to draft emails, save reminders, or take actions directly from their inbox, effectively turning Gmail into a command center.

Positioned as Google’s answer to OpenAI’s Pulse feature, CC leverages Google’s deep access to users’ existing Workspace data, giving it a significant advantage in context and accuracy. The tool is launching in early access for U.S. and Canadian users over 18, with priority given to Google AI Ultra and Google One AI Premium subscribers, and interested users can join the waitlist through Google Labs.

AGI

Google’s view on AGI

Demis Hassabis argues that reaching AGI will require both continued scaling and major scientific breakthroughs, because today’s models still show “jagged” intelligence—superhuman in some areas but unreliable in basic reasoning, consistency, and self-correction. He sees the missing ingredients for AGI as robust reasoning and planning, calibrated uncertainty, continual learning, and deep world understanding built through high-fidelity simulations.

He believes simulations will let us probe the nature of intelligence and even compare AGI to the human mind to reveal what, if anything, is uniquely human. Demis expects AGI’s societal impact to rival the Industrial Revolution but unfold ten times faster, likely requiring new economic systems and global cooperation that institutions are not yet prepared for. Ultimately, he leans toward the view that everything in the universe, including consciousness, may be computable—meaning that classical machines could, in principle, replicate all aspects of human cognition.

IMAGE MODELS

The new ChatGPT Images is here

OpenAI’s new GPT Image 1.5 update brings major improvements to ChatGPT’s built-in image generator and editor, matching and in some cases surpassing the capabilities introduced by Google’s Gemini “Nano Banana” upgrade in August, with both systems now able to modify specific parts of an image while keeping the rest intact, combine multiple photos into a single scene, and perform complex edits such as object removal or clothing changes with impressive accuracy.

In direct comparison tests, each model produced similarly strong results for basic generation and clean edits, though both struggled with perspective shifts, and ChatGPT showed a slight advantage in following instructions consistently and blending multiple images into a coherent final picture, while Nano Banana sometimes produced output that looked more cut-and-paste.

AGI

Microsoft’s view on AGI

Mustafa Suleyman frames Microsoft’s AGI goal very differently from the usual “Google vs OpenAI race” narrative: he says there is no single “win AGI” finish line and no true zero-sum race, because powerful models, methods, and knowledge will proliferate across labs and countries within a year or two of each breakthrough.

On AGI/ASI, he treats them as points on a curve, aiming for a system that can ultimately outperform humans at most tasks, but insists the urgent priority is containment and safety, not just raw capability: no AI legal personhood, no unbounded self-improving systems that we can’t control, and a strongly “humanist” stance that AGI must be aligned with and constrained for the benefit and survival of our species, even as Microsoft aggressively builds toward superintelligence.