31 results
JULY 1, 2026 / AI
The Google Cloud Workbench Notebooks extension for VS Code has officially launched, allowing developers to connect their local IDE to scalable, cloud-based Jupyter environments. This integration streamlines the machine learning lifecycle by eliminating context switching and providing direct access to high-performance Google Cloud infrastructure. To support transparency and community-driven innovation, the newly released extension is fully open-sourced and available on GitHub and the VS Code Marketplace.
JUNE 17, 2026 / Web
This post introduces three architectural patterns designed to integrate Model Context Protocol (MCP) Apps and Agent-to-User Interface (A2UI) to solve the tradeoff between highly custom iframe environments and native, declarative rendering. By combining these approaches, developers can serve native-feeling UIs directly over MCP servers, embed complex and stateful iframe apps securely inside declarative views, or inject generative UI components into legacy systems. Ultimately, these hybrid frameworks empower engineering teams to deliver secure, performant, and brand-consistent agentic user experiences tailored to their specific project constraints.
MAY 26, 2026 / Google Pay
We are excited to bring Express checkout with Google Pay for Android native apps enabling developers...
MAY 4, 2026 / AI
Researchers at UCSD have successfully implemented DFlash, a block-diffusion speculative decoding method, on Google TPUs to bypass the sequential bottlenecks of traditional autoregressive drafting. By "painting" entire blocks of candidate tokens in a single forward pass rather than predicting them one-by-one, the system achieved average speedups of 3.13x, with peak performance nearly doubling that of existing methods like EAGLE-3. This open-source integration into the vLLM ecosystem optimizes TPU hardware by leveraging "free" parallel verification and high-quality draft predictions for complex reasoning tasks.
APRIL 15, 2026 / Pay
Google has introduced enhancements to the Google Pay API to provide developers with greater flexibility and control over merchant-initiated transactions (MIT). The update includes new objects within the PaymentDataRequest to specifically handle recurring subscriptions, deferred payments like hotel bookings, and automatic account reloads. By allowing merchants to clearly define future payment terms, these changes improve transparency for users and help reduce transaction declines through better token management. Developers can now implement these features to create more seamless and secure long-term payment experiences.
MARCH 31, 2026 / AI
The newly introduced continuous checkpointing feature in Orbax and MaxText is designed to optimize the balance between reliability and performance during model training, addressing issues with conventional fixed-frequency checkpointing. Unlike fixed intervals—which can either compromise reliability or bottleneck performance—continuous checkpointing maximizes I/O bandwidth and minimizes failure risk by asynchronously initiating a new save operation only after the previous one successfully completes. Benchmarks demonstrate that this approach significantly reduces checkpoint intervals and results in substantial resource conservation, especially in large-scale training jobs where mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) is short.
MARCH 9, 2026 / Cloud
Wednesday Build Hour is a weekly, interactive "technical gym session" led by Google Cloud experts to help developers and architects sharpen their cloud skills. Moving beyond passive slide decks, the program focuses on hands-on building, covering advanced topics like AI agents, Vertex AI, and developer productivity tools. Each hour-long session is designed to provide tangible results that participants can immediately deploy into their own workflows. It serves as a consistent, dedicated space for builders to stay ahead of the curve and connect with a community of cloud engineers.
FEB. 19, 2026 / Gemini
The Android XR team is using Gemini's Canvas feature to make creating immersive extended reality (XR) experiences more accessible. This allows developers to rapidly prototype interactive 3D environments and models on a Samsung Galaxy XR headset using simple creative prompts.
FEB. 3, 2026 / AI
Finetuning the FunctionGemma model is made fast and easy using the lightweight JAX-based Tunix library on Google TPUs, a process demonstrated here using LoRA for supervised finetuning. This approach delivers significant accuracy improvements with high TPU efficiency, culminating in a model ready for deployment.
JAN. 16, 2026 / AI
FunctionGemma is a specialized AI model for function calling. This post explains why fine-tuning is key to resolving tool selection ambiguity (e.g., internal vs. Google search) and achieving ultra-specialization, transforming it into a strict, enterprise-compliant agent. A case study demonstrates the improved logic. It also introduces the "FunctionGemma Tuning Lab," a no-code demo on Hugging Face Spaces, which streamlines the entire fine-tuning process for developers.
