Google on Thursday announced a major rebrand of Bard, its artificial intelligence chatbot and assistant, including a fresh app and subscription options. Bard, a chief competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is now called Gemini, the same name as the suite of AI models that power the chatbot.
Google also announced new ways for consumers to access the AI tool: As of Thursday, Android users can download a new dedicated Android app for Gemini, and iPhone users can use Gemini within the Google app on iOS.
Google’s rebrand and app offerings underline the company’s commitment to pursuing — and investing heavily in — AI assistants or agents, a term often used to describe tools ranging from chatbots to coding assistants and other productivity tools.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai highlighted the firm’s commitment to AI during the company’s Jan. 30 earnings call. Pichai said he eventually wants to offer an AI agent that can complete more and more tasks on a user’s behalf, including within Google Search, although he said there is “a lot of execution ahead.” Likewise, chief executives at tech giants from Microsoft to Amazon underlined their commitment to building AI agents as productivity tools.
Google’s Gemini changes are a first step to “building a true AI assistant,” Sissie Hsiao, a vice president at Google and general manager for Google Assistant and Bard, told reporters on a call Wednesday.
Google on Thursday also announced a new AI subscription option, for power users who want access to Gemini Ultra 1.0, Google’s most powerful AI model. Access costs $19.99 per month through Google One, the company’s paid storage offering. For existing Google One subscribers, that price includes the storage plans they may already be paying for. There’s also a two-month free trial available.
Thursday’s rollouts are available to users in more than 150 countries and territories, but they’re restricted to the English language for now. Google plans to expand language offerings to include Japanese and Korean soon, as well as other languages.
The Bard rebrand also affects Duet AI, Google’s former name for the “packaged AI agents” within Google Workspace and Google Cloud, which are designed to boost productivity and complete simple tasks for client companies including Wayfair, GE, Spotify and Pfizer. The tools will now be known as Gemini for Workspace and Gemini for Google Cloud.
Google One subscribers who pay for the AI subscription will also have access to Gemini’s assistant capabilities in Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Meet, executives told reporters Wednesday. Google hopes to incorporate more context into Gemini from users’ content in Gmail, Docs and Drive. For example, if you were responding to a long email thread, suggested responses would eventually take in context from both earlier messages in the thread and potentially relevant files in Google Drive.
As for the reason for the broad name change? Google’s Hsiao told reporters Wednesday that it’s about helping users understand that they’re interacting directly with the AI models that underpin the chatbot.
“Bard [was] the way to talk to our cutting-edge models, and Gemini is our cutting-edge models,” Hsiao said.
Eventually, AI agents could potentially schedule a group hangout by scanning everyone’s calendar to make sure there are no conflicts, book travel and activities, buy presents for loved ones or perform a specific job function such as outbound sales. Currently, though, the tools, including Gemini, are largely limited to tasks such as summarizing, generating to-do lists or helping to write code.
“We will again use generative AI there, particularly with our most advanced models and Bard,” Pichai said on the Jan. 30 earnings call, speaking about Google Assistant and Search. That “allows us to act more like an agent over time, if I were to think about the future and maybe go beyond answers and follow-through for users even more.”
In just 17 days after launch, Temu surpassed Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Shein on the Apple App Store in the U.S., according to Apptopia data shared with CNBC.
Stefani Reynolds | Afp | Getty Images
Chinese online retailer Temu, whose “Shop like a billionaire” marketing campaign made its way to last year’s Super Bowl, has dramatically slashed its online ad spending in the U.S. and seen its ranking in Apple’s App Store plunge following President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on trade partners.
Temu, which is owned by Chinese e-commerce giant PDD Holdings, had been on an online advertising blitz in recent years in a bid to attract deal-hungry American shoppers to its site. With hefty spending on TV ads as well across Facebook, the company promoted clothing, jewelry, home goods and electronics at bargain basement prices.
The strategy was so effective that Temu topped Apple’s list of the most downloaded free apps in the U.S. for the past two years. Downloads of Temu on Apple’s App Store have fallen 62% in recent days, according to data from SimilarWeb, a digital data and analytics company. Ads for 50-cent eyebrow trimmers and $5 t-shirts that used to blanket Google search results and Facebook feeds have all but disappeared.
President Trump’s tariffs have upended Temu’s business model, along with its advertising strategy. Packages shipped from China are now subject to a tariff rate of 145%, while the de minimis provision, which allows shipments worth less than $800 to enter the country duty-free, is set to go away on May 2.
Temu and Shein, a fast-fashion marketplace with ties to China, plan to raise their prices in response to the tariffs. Both companies posted notices to their websites in recent days that warned they’ll be raising prices late next week.
“Due to recent changes in global trade rules and tariffs, our operating expenses have gone up,” Temu said on its site. “To keep offering the products you love without compromising on quality, we will be making price adjustments starting April 25, 2025.”
Sellers on Amazon’s third-party marketplace, many of whom source their products from China, have said they’re considering raising prices as they reckon with higher costs from the tariffs. Many businesses on TikTok Shop, the social media app’s marketplace, also count on Chinese manufacturers for their items.
Amazon launched a competitor to Temu last November, called Amazon Haul, which features items under $20 that are largely from China.
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The Temu app is now No. 69 in a list of the top free apps in the U.S., after consistently ranking in the top 10, according to data from Sensor Tower. Shein is currently at 42, down from 15 last month. PDD’s shares that trade in the U.S. have plummeted 22% this month, compared to the Nasdaq’s 6% drop. Shein is privately held.
Rival Chinese retailers have subsequently risen to the top of the app store ranks, including Beijing-based wholesaler DHgate, which surged to the No. 2 top free iPhone app in the U.S., and Alibaba‘s Taobao, which ranked No. 7. Bloomberg reported on Tuesday that viral videos promoting their cheap products have spurred the download frenzy.
A separate analysis by SimilarWeb showed Temu’s paid traffic, or search, display and social media advertising that drove visits to its website, has dropped 77% since April 11. Temu’s paid traffic previously outpaced nonpaid traffic to its website by 2 1/2 times, Ben Parkes, a consumer goods and retail analyst at Similarweb, said in an interview.
Marketing firm Tinuiti found that 20% of U.S. Google Shopping ad impressions were bought by Temu on April 5. A week later, that number had fallen to zero. By comparison, Shein’s impressions remained at 17% on April 12, while 60% of impressions were bought by Amazon.
Representatives from Temu and Shein didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Temu was previously one of Meta’s largest advertisers, but it appears to have dramatically scaled back its spending on the platform. As of Wednesday, Temu is running six ads across Meta platforms in the U.S., a review of Meta’s ad library shows. Temu is running approximately 27,000 ads across Meta sites and apps globally, particularly in Europe and the U.K.
That could be troublesome for Meta’s advertising business, which has gotten a significant boost from the discount retailer. Advertising analyst Brian Wieser at Madison and Wall estimated that more than $7 billion of Meta’s $132 billion in ad revenue in 2023 came from China. Meta is scheduled to report first-quarter results on April 30.
E-commerce analyst Juozas Kaziukenas said he expects Temu to turn its ads back on in the U.S. at some point, but that the company appears to be shifting its dollars to other markets in the interim.
“It doesn’t mean Temu usage has dropped as significantly as the app did,” Kaziukenas said in an email. “But it means that new user acquisition is gone.”
The Spotify logo is displayed on a screen on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Dec. 4, 2023.
Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters
Spotify was down Wednesday, with about 50,000 reports of an outage on Downdetector.
The company posted an all-clear to social media site X just after noon EDT, thanking listeners for their patience.
“Spotify experienced an outage today beginning around 6:20am EDT. As of 11:45am EDT, Spotify is back up and functioning normally,” the company said in a statement.
The music-streaming giant did not provide additional details about the scope of the outage.
Users peppered the replies to the company’s outage announcement with frustrations and memes.
“I’ll just hum to myself,” wrote user @alexissTyler.
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The company recently reported its first profitable year and said it paid a record $10 billion in royalties to the music industry.
Nearly 1,500 artists generated more than $1 million individually, according to Spotify’s annual Loud and Clear Report, and more than 80% of those in that pool did not have a song reach the app’s Global Daily Top 50 Chart.
The app has added new advertising features in recent months.
Earlier in April, the company released new generative artificial intelligence ads and reported that automated ad channels drove $2 billion in ad spending with digital audio since the beginning of the year.
Out of the company’s 675 million monthly active users, more than half are free users who are served ads when they stream music.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, attends the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit at the Grand Palais in Paris, Feb. 10, 2025.
Benoit Tessier | Reuters
Shares of Advanced Micro Devices slid more than 5% on Wednesday after the company said it could incur charges of up to $800 million for exporting its MI308 products to China and other countries.
“The Company expects to apply for licenses but there is no assurance that licenses will be granted,” AMD said in the filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The new U.S. license requirement, which applies to exports of certain semiconductor products, would hit inventory, purchase commitments and related reserves, AMD said in the filing.
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AMD is one of the companies that builds the hardware behind the artificial intelligence boom. The company claims its AMD Instinct MI300 Series accelerators are “uniquely well-suited to power even the most demanding AI and HPC workloads,” according to its website.
It generated a “record” revenue of $25.8 billion in 2025, according to its February earnings release, but the new export restrictions could slow growth.
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AMD one month stock chart.
Nvidia, an AMD competitor, released a similar disclosure on Tuesday. The company said it will take a quarterly charge of about $5.5 billion for exporting H20 graphics processing units.
China is Nvidia’s fourth-largest region by sales, after the U.S., Singapore, and Taiwan, according to the company’s annual report. More than half of its sales went to U.S. companies in its fiscal year that ended in January.
–CNBC’s Kif Leswing and Jordan Novet contributed to this report.