TECH NEWS

Google Vids now lets you star in your own AI videos

11:32 AM PDT · July 16, 2026

OpenAI’s Sora may have shut down, but Google apparently thinks there’s still interest in a tool that lets you star in your own AI videos. On Thursday, the tech giant announced an update to Google Vids that will allow you to create a custom digital avatar that looks and sounds like you based on a selfie and a voice recording you upload.

In addition, Google said it’s bringing its multi-modal AI model Gemini Omni to Vids, letting you create videos using a combination of a written prompt and reference images you upload. Omni then mixes those inputs together to create the AI video you want. It can also be used to do things like swap out the background or fix the lighting in a video recorded on your phone, or add effects.

Plus, Omni now supports step-by-step edits, meaning you can make...

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Introducing Grok on Amazon Bedrock | Amazon Web Services

This post is co-written with Eric Jiang from xAI (SpaceXAI). xAI’s Grok 4.3 is now generally available on Amazon Bedrock, giving teams that build agents and AI workflows a model that reasons reliably over long inputs. With this launch, xAI joins Amazon Bedrock as a model provider. Grok

Google updates its AI video editor Vids with Gemini Omni and a feature that lets users create custom digital avatars using a selfie and voice recording

Sponsor Posts Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning — SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds. Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens. Stop vibe coding analytics — Equals AI turns questions about your business into

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AI-powered software could recover 300GW of hidden capacity for the US power grid, enough to power thousands of AI data…

* AI software claims hidden grid capacity could ease America's growing electricity shortage * GridCARE says simulations reveal unused transmission capacity across existing power infrastructure * Existing transmission lines may hold far more capacity than previously estimated A new software platform claims it can unlock roughly 300 gigawatts of hidden electrical

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China beats Elon Musk’s Neuralink to the world’s first commercial brain-computer interface implant — car crash victim given coin-sized chip that turns neural signals into hand movements

* There's been a notable first for brain-computer interfaces * A commercially-sold BCI has been implanted for the first time * It comes from Chinese company Neuracle Medical Technology There's been a notable advancement in the field of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) this week: surgeons in China have successfully implanted

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Introducing Grok on Amazon Bedrock | Amazon Web Services

Google updates its AI video editor Vids with Gemini Omni and a feature that lets users create custom digital avatars using a selfie and voice recording

AI-powered software could recover 300GW of hidden capacity for the US power grid, enough to power thousands of AI data…

China beats Elon Musk&rsquo;s Neuralink to the world&rsquo;s first commercial brain-computer interface implant &mdash; car crash victim given coin-sized chip that turns neural signals into hand movements

China beats Elon Musk’s Neuralink to the world’s first commercial brain-computer interface implant — car crash victim given coin-sized chip that turns neural signals into hand movements