Today’s Big Story

Who’s Winning the AI Race?

Google’s newest release is topping leaderboards and wowing rivals

Is this a race you’re following? You use AI, of course, but do you care who comes out on top? Perhaps the buzz has you switching models from ChatGPT to Gemini to Claude. But make no mistake, the race is on. And when a release immediately spawns memes and treatises declaring the rest of the industry cooked, The Verge says “you know you’ve got something worth dissecting.”

Google’s Gemini 3 was released to widespread fanfare … the company called it a “new era of intelligence,” integrating it into Google Search on day one for the first time. It’s blown past OpenAI and other competitors’ products on a range of benchmarks and is topping the charts on LMArena, a crowdsourced AI evaluation platform that’s essentially the Billboard Hot 100 of AI model ranking. Within 24 hours of its launch, more than one million users tried Gemini 3 in Google AI Studio and the Gemini API, per Google. “From a day one adoption standpoint, [it’s] the best we’ve seen from any of our model releases,” Google DeepMind’s Logan Kilpatrick, who is product lead for Google’s AI Studio and the Gemini API, told The Verge.

Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk publicly congratulated the Gemini team on a job well done. And Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff posted on X that after using ChatGPT every day for three years, spending two hours on Gemini 3 changed everything: “Holy shit … I’m not going back. The leap is insane—reasoning, speed, images, video… everything is sharper and faster. It feels like the world just changed, again.”

It’s hard to call Google an underdog in anything, but over the past year, many technologists wrote them off in the AI race, elevating names like OpenAI and Microsoft as the potential winners. Stock market investors, however, have been positioning for a different outcome. And now parent company Alphabet has closed in on a $4 trillion valuation, set to become only the fourth company to enter the exclusive club.

Of course, it won’t be easy (or cheap) to stay on top. Google’s AI infrastructure boss told employees that the company has to double its serving capacity every six months in order to meet demand for artificial intelligence services. “The competition in AI infrastructure is the most critical and also the most expensive part of the AI race,” Amin Vahdat said. “We’re going to spend a lot,” adding that the real goal is to provide infrastructure that is far “more reliable, more performant and more scalable than what’s available anywhere else.”

Ukraine Peace Talks Gain Momentum

The plan, which Ukraine said was too favorable to Russia, has been substantially changed

Russia launched a wave of attacks on Ukraine early on Tuesday, killing at least six people in strikes that hit city buildings and energy infrastructure, while a Ukrainian attack in southern Russia killed three people and damaged homes, authorities said. NATO fighter jets were also scrambled in Romania to protect its airspace as Russia attacked Ukraine overnight. Which begs the question, where are we in the peace talks process?

The Washington Post reports that the U.S and Ukraine significantly changed a controversial 28-point plan to end the war following frenzied meetings in Geneva that brought the two sides closer to an agreement after the White House pushed Kyiv to sign off on the plan by Thanksgiving. But the changes, which two Ukrainian officials said were much more palatable to their country, could very well be less acceptable to Russia—the paradox that has long resulted in an impasse over ending the war.

The demands on both sides are irreconcilable. Russia will never withdraw to a pre-2014 position, analysts say. Ukraine will never agree to a deal that doesn’t include assurances against a future invasion by Russia. But in between those positions, what are the cards each side holds? Where is there room for negotiation? The New York Times’ Ukraine bureau chief says “territory is absolutely critical. They also need credible security guarantees … and for Russia it means ruling out Ukrainian NATO membership for good.”

The Next Pet Trend?

Raccoons are showing early signs of domestication

Extreme politics, climate change … the world can seem chaotic, but here’s an interesting development that may or may not tickle you: City-dwelling raccoons seem to be evolving a shorter snout—a telltale feature of our pets and other domesticated animals. The same evolutionary forces that turned wolves into domesticated dogs over thousands of years may now be reshaping urban raccoons, recent studies suggest.

After all, these little scavengers are already pretty cute. Affectionately dubbed “trash pandas”, North America’s ubiquitous backyard bandits already have dexterous childlike hands and cheeky “masks”. The study lays out the case that the domestication process is often wrongly thought of as initiated by humans—with people capturing and selectively breeding wild animals. But the study authors claim that the process begins much earlier, when animals become habituated to human environments.

Easy food rewards the bolder, calmer raccoons—the ones willing to hang around people in a less aggressive way so they don't become a nuisance. Researchers told Scientific American that raccoons living near people develop snouts about 3.5% shorter than their rural cousins, along with smaller heads, floppier ears, softer features and lighter fur or white patches—all hallmarks of domestication.

The World’s New Most Populous City

This “megacity” has overtaken Tokyo

You wouldn’t know it when I’m packed elbow-to-elbow on the train during rush hour, but Tokyo is no longer the most populous city in the world. Jakarta has just been named to the top spot.

Like Tokyo, Indonesia’s sprawling capital is known as a megacity and these population-dense hubs are becoming more and more frequent across the globe. Per a new report from the United Nations, approximately 45% of the world’s population lives in a city, and Jakarta is now home to nearly 42 million residents. Dhaka in Bangladesh follows closely with almost 40 million people. Tokyo, which held the No. 1 position for years, now stands at around 33 million.

The report, which comes from the U.N.'s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, highlights how city growth and expansion can offer warnings about sustainable development worldwide. More than half of the megacities (19) are in Asia. In fact, Cairo, Egypt, was the only non-Asian city to rank among the top 10. Axios points out that Dhaka is expected to become the world's largest city by the middle of the century.

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