Sundar Pichai says even more AI is coming to Google Search in 2025 - Related to coming, search, more, pc, newest

Sundar Pichai says even more AI is coming to Google Search in 2025

Google will continue to go all in on AI in 2025, CEO Sundar Pichai introduced during the organization’s Q4 earnings call Wednesday. Alphabet shares have since dropped more than 7% on news that the organization giant fell short of fourth-quarter revenue expectations and introduced an ambitious spending plan for its AI development.

“As AI continues to expand the universe of queries that people can ask, 2025 is going to be one of the biggest years for search innovation yet,” he expressed during the call. Pichai added that Search is on a “journey” from simply presenting a list of links to offering a more Assistant-like experience. Whether clients actually want that, remains to be seen.

“I think the [Search] product will evolve even more,” Pichai continued. “As you make it more easy for people to interact and ask follow-up questions, etc., I think we have an opportunity to drive further growth.” And with any luck, Google’s AI empowered Search of tomorrow will stop recommending glue as a pizza topping.

The organization also introduced that it plans to spend about $75 billion in AI capital expenditures this year in an effort to keep up with the rest of the rapidly growing AI market. For comparison, Meta has introduced that it plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion on its AI efforts in 2025 while Microsoft has committed $80 billion in AI capital expenditures.

However, it is increasingly unclear if those levels of expenditure are actually necessary, given the efficiency revelations emerging from DeepSeek’s recent model unveiling, which offers comparable performance to OpenAI’s latest models but at a fraction of the cost and power consumption. Pichai played down some of those concerns during the call, stating that Google’s Gemini family are, “some of the most efficient models out there, including comparing to DeepSeek’s V3 and R1.”.

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The Switch’s newest game is the next best thing to Animal Crossing

When it comes to Nintendo Switch games, we’re in a bit of a holding pattern. Nintendo’s next console is right around the corner and new releases for its old one have stalled as a result. We expect Metroid Prime 4: Beyond and Pokémon Legends: Z-A to be the system’s last games, but we’re only getting ports of a few older games until then. If you’re used to getting a big new Switch game every month, you might find yourself a little restless for the next few months.

Thankfully, third-party publishers are doing their part to fill that gap. This week, Switch owners just got what might be one of its last must-own games thanks to Hello Kitty: Island Adventure. The life sim is the closest thing you’ll get to a new Animal Crossing game on the Switch. Considering that Nintendo has no games of its own scheduled to launch until March, this is the next best thing.

Originally released as an Apple Arcade , Hello Kitty: Island Adventure takes the idea of Animal Crossing but replaces Nintendo’s characters with Sanrio favorites like My Melody and Kuromi. It’s a match made in heaven that has supposedly paid off for Apple, as the enterprise asserts that it’s one of the service’s most popular games. With it now widely available on Nintendo Switch and PC (with PlayStation and Xbox launches to come), it’s easy to see why.

On its surface, Island Adventure is a fairly standard genre game. Players can buy clothing, catch fish, bake treats, and decorate cabins just as you can in Animal Crossing. It wears its inspiration on its sleeve, even if it’s mechanically lighter in places. Updates over the past two years have added significantly more content to the game, though, and that’s all available in the new port.

What makes Island Adventure memorable is where it departs from its inspiration rather than copies its notes. While it’s a life sim at its core, it’s also a small-scale open-world game. In between daily tasks, players explore an island filled with different themed biomes, from a spooky zone to an underwater area. There are story quests to complete in each area and even Breath of the Wild-esque puzzle shrines, collectibles, and time trials scattered through the world. It’s somewhere between Animal Crossing and Infinity Nikki.

There are even aspects here that the next Animal Crossing game could stand to borrow. For instance, Island Adventure takes a more involved approach to villager interactions than New Horizons. It aspects a bond system, where players can increase their standing with each NPC by bringing them gifts and completing quests. That’s a step up from Animal Crossing’s flatter approach to characters that doesn’t quite make them feel like neighbors so much as friendly faces that spit out one-liners. It’s clear that Sanrio cares about its characters and wants to make sure they feel like friends with their own distinct personalities, not visitors who interchangeably move in and out of town on a whim.

If that all sounds great, remember to keep your expectations in check. This is still a game that was designed with mobile in mind, even though it’s coming to consoles. The platforming shrines tend to revolve around unremarkable box pushing puzzles and the core social loop is built to tease players into logging in day after day. It can get repetitive after a while, which led me to bounce off the original release eventually once it felt like I was logging in every day to collect the same few resources and bake the same pies.

Even with some limitations, Hello Kitty: Island Adventure feels right at home on Nintendo Switch. It’s a kind-hearted game filled with soft visuals, cute characters, and approachable gameplay. You’d think that Nintendo itself made it. It’s a cozy little delight that should keep you warm until Nintendo’s much anticipated April Switch 2 Direct.

Hello Kitty: Island Adventure is available now on Nintendo Switch, PC, and iOS via Apple Arcade.

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This Steam hack has saved me a ton of money on PC games

Table of Contents Table of Contents The hack An odd recommendation engine.

I have a massive Steam library, and like most PC gamers I know, I’m always looking to add to it. Will I actually play the games? Maybe. Will I complete all of them? Certainly not. But I’m caught in a negative feedback loop of picking up new games constantly for pennies on the dollar, and Steam is feeding my addiction more than ever before.

How? With Steam bundles. Steam bundles aren’t anything new, but I’ve seen a stark uptick in them over the last several months. They mostly revolve around similarly styled indie titles, offering a small discount of around 10% if you buy two or three games in bulk. That’s not why I’ve taken advantage of Steam bundles so often over the past several months, though.

Here’s what’s great about Steam bundles — you don’t need to buy every game in the bundle. Or, at the very least, you don’t need to re-buy every game. Steam takes into account games you already own when you look at a bundle, and you’ll get a discounted price on top of the games you already own.

Let me give you an example. Last night, I picked up the Castlevania Dominus Collection for a bit of vampire castle-crawling on an upcoming trip I’m taking. The game is on sale at the time of writing for 20% off, knocking the $25 list price down to $20. I picked up the collection for $18, however. The Dominus x Dead Cell bundle includes Dead Cells, the Return to Castlevania DLC for the game, and the Dominus Collection. I already owned Dead Cells and its DLC, so I got a straight discount on the Dominus Collection.

It’s only $2 here, but wait, it gets more effective. You’ll often find games that are a part of several different bundles, allowing you to double dip on discounts. A great example of that is Selaco. If you’re unfamiliar, Selaco is a first-person shooter in early access that’s built on the original Doom engine. No, it doesn’t play like Doom, but it has that undeniable retro feel that I’ve yet to see perfectly replicated in the deluge of “boomer shooters” available on Steam.

This one game is in three different bundles. You can pick it up bundled with Echo Point Nova, Mullet Madjack, and the recent Fallen Aces. I picked up one game, and suddenly, I was able to get discounts on a handful of other related games. You don’t need to buy the game through Steam, either. As long as the game is in your library, you’ll get the discount. Combine that with third-party key sellers and a revolving door of deals on games, and you can save quick a bit of money.

The bundles on Steam have turned me onto new games, too. I never would’ve found out about Echo Point Nova had it not been for the Selaco bundle, and I would’ve completely missed one of the most inventive first-person shooters I’ve played in the past decade. Maybe I would’ve discovered the game on my own, and I might’ve even bought it. But being pushed to consider a new game and getting a solid discount on top of it? That seals the deal quickly.

I’ve found bundles more consistently with indie games, but some larger titles get bundled up, as well. For instance, there’s a bundle with Metaphor: ReFantazio and Persona 5 Royal, which you can, again, get on a discount when you own either game. Both of these games are on sale at the time of writing, too, which is factored into the overall discount you get. That’s an inexpensive way to pick up one of the best games of 2024.

The main downside is that there isn’t an easy way to see what bundles are available on Steam. Sometimes they’re listed alongside a game included in a particular bundle, but other times they aren’t. For instance, you can find the Mullet Madjack and Fallen Aces bundle with Selaco, but not the Echo Point Nova one. You can just search “bundle” on Steam, but that returns thousands of irrelevant results. I wouldn’t recommend it.

If you want to keep an eye on bundles, here’s what’s worked best for me. I liberally add games to my Steam wishlist, even if I’m only remotely interested in playing some of them. The wishlist on Steam presents you the lowest price available for a particular game, so if that game is part of a bundle when you can get a discount based on your current Steam library, you’ll see that lower price. That’s how I found out about the discount on the Castlevania Dominus Collection in the first place.

Bundles for PC games aren’t anything new, and Steam itself has been doing them for years. However, there’s been a clear uptick in bundles for high-quality games, particularly focused on similar publishers and developers. For instance, developer Motion Twin has a bundle where you can pick up its new Windblown game at a discount if you already own Dead Cells (the developer’s first game). These odds and ends add up quickly, and they’ve built my Steam library massively in the past few months.

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