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USA TODAY Sports Top IX flag football players of Week 9
These nine flag football players made their mark across the country this week, earning a spot among USA TODAY Sports Top IX.
Muncy Delivers Resilient Season as Dodgers’ Longest-Tenured Player
Max Muncy remained a key contributor for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2026, while establishing himself as one of the club’s most experienced leaders.
Buccaneers Have an Extremely Crowded Wednesday Injury Report
The Bucs have a lot of players on their first injury report of the week as they prepare for a showdown with the Carolina Panthers.
49ers, Jaguars Floated Trade Idea Involving $14.6 Million Player
The San Francisco 49ers appear to be one of the buyers ahead of the Nov. 10 trade deadline. So far this 2026 NFL season, the Niners have established themselves as a Super Bowl contender. Despite the impressive start to the campaign, San Francisco does have areas of concern such as the wide receiver position. During […] The post 49ers, Jaguars Floated Trade Idea Involving $14.6 Million Player appeared first on HEAVY.
NFLPA calls for investigation into Eagles’ handling of Jalen Hurts’ health
The players union isn’t happy with the NFL’s defense of the Eagles regarding Jalen Hurts.
GOP player in ‘ghost’ candidate scandal behind texts slamming AG candidate
Alex Alvarado’s political action committee sent the texts attacking Jose Javier Rodriguez, the Democrat running for Florida attorney general, and was an early supporter of Republican Attorney General James Uthmeier’s campaign.
Entertainment 360, Griffin Gaming: HITpoint Bridges Gaming, Hollywood
Bridging gaming and Hollywood, the new player will "source, develop, package, and produce adaptations" across genres, including action, horror, high-concept spectacle, comedy and beyond.
Through pioneers and slow progress, America's relationship to women's sports continues to evolve
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Athletes and fans of women's sports across the United States have found no shortage of reasons to celebrate: historic TV ratings, changing attitudes toward female players, high-profile wins for equal opportunities and pay.
Populous and Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment Debut Phase Three of Barclays Center Transformation
Brooklyn-inspired hospitality spaces and a reimagined fan arrival experience advance a long-term vision for the arena.——–A reimagined 9,000-square-foot hospitality destination was also debuted and inspired by the layered evolution of Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood and Barclays Center’s tradition of celebrating the borough through thoughtfully designed spaces. Steel trusses span the high ceilings, while brick and concrete finishes […]
Liverpool Injury News: Szoboszlai, Munoz, and Frimpong Latest
Liverpool fans have been provided with a series of fitness updates following the team's pre-Brighton training session this morning. Multiple players face a race against time to be fit for the weekend's Premier League clash, with others set for longer layoffs.
Resident Evil: Requiem made more money on PlayStation discs than on Xbox in total, reportedly, as Sony's march to a discless future continues
Single-player blockbuster PlayStation games still sell in notable quantities on disc, statistics show. In Japan, the desire for physical is even higher.
Joe Burrow has never hidden his political beliefs
Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow didn’t have much to say about Vice President JD Vance’s surprise visit to practice on Wednesday. But for a player who has rarely been shy about speaking his mind, his short response certainly caught some attention. Burrow said that he didn’t get a chance to meet Vance, noting that the…
College football Week 8 players to watch: Boise State's Dylan Riley could retake the nation's rushing lead against Washington State
Suns-Trail Blazers Injury Report: Pair of Key Players Headline
Wednesday's injury report yields interesting conversations across both teams.
Lowry joins McIlroy in first ever TGL Trade
Shane Lowry is the first player to be traded in the TMRW Golf League (TGL) as he joins Rory McIlroy at Boston Common Golf for 2027.
Who should win the men’s Ballon d’Or? The Athletic asked 100 people from elite football to vote
Our reporters asked players and managers, past and present, coaches, sporting directors, scouts and presidents to vote for their top 10
Monday practice report for Patriots
Patriots have A.J. Brown, Drake Maye among players listed on Monday's estimated practice report
Sony Continues Its March Towards An All Digital Future As It Reportedly Kills Off Its Last 4K UHD Player
It's part of a larger push by the PlayStation maker to move away from making home electronics, like TVs
As flag football becomes official sport in Oregon, Salem-Keizer coaches, players hopeful about future
The decision is particularly meaningful for some Salem-Keizer Public Schools teams that have been invested since the sport began gaining popularity in 2023.
MLB free agency Top 50: Ranking the best players available this winter, starting with Tarik Skubal and Freddy Peralta
Mountain West Connection Players of the Week: Week 7
Who were the top performers from this past weekend?
Not Just Game Discs: Sony's Killing Its Blu-Ray Players, Too
The end to Sony's last 'budget' 4K Blu-ray player means physical media could become more bespoke and—worse—more expensive.
Warriors exploring trades for Kristaps Porziņģis, who is contemplating future amid health issues, per report
Porziņģis missed the entire preseason and his future as a Warrior and as a pro basketball player are now in doubt
Detroit Lions Host Former Notre Dame Defensive Lineman for Visit
The Detroit Lions hosted defensive tackle Aidan Keanaaina for a visit ahead of their Packers matchup. Here's what to know about the former Notre Dame player.
RFK Jr. ally Calley Means quits Trump administration amid food agenda delays
Means has been a key player in Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement.
“We were told…”: Why Dortmund stars fled before showering
After their narrow 2–1 win over Azerbaijani champions FK Sabah, Borussia Dortmund’s players left the Olympic Stadium in Baku without showering. The immediate departure on the BVB team bus was appa...
Knicks’ OG Anunoby Drops Unexpected Photo Featuring Anne Hathaway
For Knicks fans, this week feels like Christmas came early.After 53 years of waiting, the championship banner finally goes up at Madison Square Garden, and the players get their rings in front of a crowd that has earned it.The players have spent the last few days at practice, getting ready for LeBron James and the […] The post Knicks’ OG Anunoby Drops Unexpected Photo Featuring Anne Hathaway appeared first on HEAVY.
Strategic Entertainment Announces Chase The King, A Chess Variant Where Players Start 1v1 And Earn Pieces By
100 Kings To Defeat, One Cursed Chess Board To Take The Crown. Coming To Steam and other PC Stores in November. Demo Now Available.
Paul
Picture a press room full of journalists, a new signing at the desk, and an executive stepping up to announce: 'I can confirm that this is not an Inter player yet. He will be in a few weeks, once we o...
Sarah Palin announces boyfriend and former NHL player Ron Duguay’s death at age 69: ‘Love never ends’
Duguay played for the New York Rangers and the Detroit Red Wings during his NHL career.
Smash Bros and Kirby creator Masahiro Sakurai says AI usage will lead to unoriginal and “unprofitable” games
Masahiro Sakurai believes AI could contribute to an even bigger flood of games that players simply don't want.
Arc Raiders player numbers hit a six-month high following the release of the extraction shooter's huge Frozen Trails update
Embark's Studios' PvEvP phenomenon Arc Raiders is still going strong, and it's all thanks to the game's recent free weekend and huge Frozen Trails update.
Dodgers announce decision on Shohei Ohtani after injuries
Shohei Ohtani’s first full season as a two-way player in three years didn’t end the way he or the Los Angeles Dodgers wanted, as injuries piled up and the Dodgers were swept out of the playoffs. But it sounds like the two-time defending champions are getting some good news on the health front, leading to…
THE SITUATIONAL: Wicked Business
Ohio State finally won on the margins and left Bloomington running out of players. A bye week has rarely felt this necessary.
Through Pioneers and Slow Progress, America's Relationship to Women's Sports Continues to Evolve
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Athletes and fans of women's sports across the United States have found no shortage of reasons to celebrate: historic TV ratings, changing attitudes toward female players, high-profile wins for equal opportunities and pay. After decades of disparity and sometimes outright scorn ...
Every Partizan player drafted by the Golden State Warriors
Let's take a look at every player who has been drafted by the Warriors out of Partizan.
Xbox Is Previewing Paid Cloud Gaming For Players Without Game Pass
Here come new rate limits.
Hudson Williams says he’s writing a film but ‘getting tripped up’ over a “Heated Rivalry” parallel (exclusive)
The actor, who’s written multiple short films, talks about getting in his head about a character who’s an ex-hockey player.
Released Titans player nearly confronted teammate with gun: Reports
The Titans released Jordan Elliott after an incident in practice involving a gun and JC Latham, according to multiple reports.
Jane Muir: Champion of Community and Leader in Business Law
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Setting the standard for efficiency and community engagement, while blending professional acumen with altruism Jane Muir is a leader in the Miami legal landscape. She founded J. Muir & Associates in 2018 and has spent over 15 years building a business law practice, a strong team and a sterling […]
Lions PFF Rankings: Detroit's 5 Highest-Graded Offensive Stars
The Lions are coming off their bye week with several offensive stars playing at an elite level. From Penei Sewell’s dominance to Jahmyr Gibbs’ explosive production, here are Detroit’s top five PFF-graded players.
Every player from Alabama to play for the Boston Celtics
Our focus in this article is Al Butler.
Steelers rookie Germie Bernard nominated for NFL award
Pittsburgh Steelers rookie wide receiver Germie Bernard was nominated for the FedEx Air & Ground Player of the Week for his historic performance in Sunday’s overtime win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Jaden McDaniels becomes the first player in NBA …
Jaden McDaniels becomes the first player in NBA …
Looking at 2026 season report card for Padres players
News to know about your San Diego Padres and MLB for October 20, 2026.
How well have past GOTY winners sold?
We’re less than two months away from 2026’s The Game Awards, and what a year it’s been for fantastic games, including Resident Evil Requiem, Forza Horizon 6, Slay the Spire II, the Blood of Dawnwalker, and Control Resonant – just to name a few. So as we approach the end of the year, we thought we’d look back on our estimates for the GOTY winners of the past four years. In terms of revenue, Elden Ring (2022 winner), Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023), Astro Bot (2024), and Expedition 33 (2025) have generated a combined $3.8B via 73M copies sold: Let’s have a look, then. Elden Ring has generated $2B in revenue Elden Ring is a phenomenon in every sense. It’s sold a whopping 36.4M copies across Steam (50%), PS5 (35%), and Xbox (15% across console and PC). Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Elden Ring also just passed an astronomical milestone: $2B in revenue. While PlayStation and Xbox account for half of Elden Ring’s copies sold across these three platforms, they account for 57.5% of revenue. This – as ever – is due to regional pricing and the higher relative share of PC gamers in lower-priced markets. For example, around 17.4% of Elden Ring’s Steam copies sold were in China, where the game costs about 26% less than the price in the States. There’s an … interesting narrative going around these days that console gamers are only interested in ball-and-gun games and have the patience for little else. Well, Elden Ring’s impressive sales prove that is simply not true, and across all platforms. What’s more, over 9.8M people have played Elden Ring for over 100 hours, with nearly 3.5M people getting all of the achievements and trophies. For reference, 10.9% of Elden Ring’s PlayStation players have the platinum trophy, while 10.5% of players on Steam and 3.9% of Xbox players unlocked all the achievements. Git gud, Xbox players! Of the 1.5M people who played Elden Ring on PlayStation last month, 4% also played Dark Souls 3 last month, 4% played Bloodborne, and 3% played Sekiro. There’s those Soulsborne diehards for you. By many accounts, including my own, Elden Ring is one of the best games of all time. It’s an evergreen seller that will continue to be a cash cow for Bandai and FromSoftware for years to come. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Elden Ring has sold another 2M copies across Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox this year, generating almost $110M. This means it’s outperforming many of this year’s high-profile releases. Even Elden Ring’s standalone run-based PvE spinoff, 2025’s Nightreign, has sold 7.8M copies and generated $282M in revenue. Baldur’s Gate 3 is another billion-dollar-plus banger Another cross-platform phenomenon is Baldur’s Gate 3, which has sold 23.2M copies and generated over $1.2B in revenue. About 18.7M of these copies (80.6%) are via Steam, 2.9M via PS5 (12.7%), and 1.6M (6.8%) via Xbox. Around 1.3M folks on Steam bought BG3 before it hit 1.0. The PlayStation version launched about a month after the PC 1.0 release, while the Xbox version came four months later due to technical issues around developing local co-op on the Series S. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Across platforms, Baldur’s Gate 3’s monthly active users have never dropped below 2M, including 2.2M MAUs last month (68.5% on Steam, 21.9% on PS5, and 9.6% on Xbox). And it still regularly brings in 280K to 400K players every day: About 1% of BG3’s Steam player base has played for over 500 hours! That’s a little under 200K people. Astro Bot is also an evergreen seller, albeit a more niche, family one Astro Bot, 2024’s winner, has now sold 4.7M copies and generated $291M in revenue. The budget, including marketing, is almost certainly under $100M, given the small Japan-based core team and three-year dev timeline. You can really see why the tides are changing toward less expensive hubs. Astro Bot is the only first-party winner on this list, but follows other first-party winners of The Last of Us Part II (2020’s winner), God of War (2018), and Breath of the Wild (2017). Around 46.6% of Astro Bot’s copies sold have been physical, which is far higher than the typical game. This makes sense for a couple of reasons: There’s a large family audience for this one, and physical boxes are an item to wrap when giving Astro as a gift. Astro has collector value for the PlayStation core (this is nostalgia-fueled platformer celebrating PlayStation’s history) Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Astro is another one of those games that continues selling over time, regularly selling more than 100K a month. It’s sold around 1M more copies this year ($60M in revenue) and is a popular title with families. We can see this using the Alinea platform’s MAU crossover tool: Astro Bot’s top #2, #3, and #4 games by crossover in any given month this year are Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox – without fail. The #1 title every month, though, is Astro’s Playroom, a pack-in with all PS5 consoles. For every month this year, between 20% and 30% of Astro Bot players also played Astro’s Playroom that month. So the free pack-in is a noice funnel for converting players to a full paid product. Expedition 33 sells 8.7M despite Game Pass cannibalisation Finally, we have last year’s winner – Expedition 33. The turn-based-RPG banger has generated $366M via 8.7M copies sold, with 58.8% on Steam, 35.7% on PS5, and 5.5% on Xbox. Xbox’s share of copies sold is this low due to Expedition 33 launching on Game Pass, where 4.3M people across console and PC accessed the game. A little under 700K Xbox players used their subscription to play Expedition 33 this year. That said, the game’s 1.5-year Game Pass deal ended last week on October 16, and we’re already beginning to see a positive trend on Expedition 33’s copies sold via Xbox (but the jury’s still out!). There’s understandably a lot of French pride behind this one, as France is the game’s #3 market on both Steam and PlayStation. Vive la France! One thing that stood out to me is that the GOTY winners aren’t $300M Hollywood productions made in the US. They’re mostly mid-budget studios outside the traditional AAA cost centres. Lots to think about there. Also, good games sell well; who’d have thunk it!? And there’s a whole load of them this year, with GTA 6 still to come, too. GTA just made the cutoff point for the VGAs this year. What a coincidence! Loading... Cool links and other stuff Our physical games newsletter from Tuesday was picked up by GameSpot, Eurogamer, TweakTown, and a bunch of others. We’re offering a free trial of our platform for games companies. Send us a message here, or reply right here on Substack/email, and we’ll set you up. Next week, we’ve got some exciting news regarding the future of our newsletter, so stay tuned! The last word Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover. Want to see why these companies (and many others) are subscribed to Alinea? Get a free platform trial! [Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]
'World Class' - Celtic Player Solution to Martin O'Neill's Problems
The Celtic player has one 'world class' attribute that will remind fans of a certain Kyogo Furuhashi.
SonicFox Cancels Contract With Gaming Convention After Event Uses Likeness in AI-Generated Poster
Prolific fighting game player SonicFox has terminated their contract with a tournament in Norman, Oklahoma after organizers fed artwork of their mascot character into AI to generate a promotional poster for the event.
🔮 The 4️⃣ emerging options for the Manchester United job
It's already a crisis!After the crushing 4-1 defeat to Como in the Champions League, the Manchester United hot seat is under intense scrutiny.With an apparent rift with some senior players and results...
This Is Why You Don't Peel Off the iPhone Duo's Matte Screen Layer
A viral video shows how the iPhone Duo's nano-texture layer makes the foldable screen much more pleasant to look at than Android foldables.
A Look at the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Pending Free Agents
The Pittsburgh Pirates have a key player set to become a free agent this offseason.
Three Mizzou players picked for Sports Illustrated All-America honors
Running back Jamal Roberts and offensive tackle Cayden Green were picked for fist-team honors. Quarterback Austin Simmons is in the midst of weighing his options for 2027, according to a
ASU hockey incident raises questions about athletes’ mental health support
The events of Aug. 20 involving Arizona State hockey player Matthew Mayich open the conversation regarding mental health resources and creating an environment where college athletes feel safe seeking support.
Mikel Arteta Drops Bukayo Saka Injury Update Ahead of Everton
Everton face Arsenal this weekend, and the Gunners could be without one of their star players in Bukayo Saka.
Washington Nationals Player Report Cards: Role player edition
Taking a look at how some of the role players for the Washington Nationals' fared during the 2026 regular season
Rams TE Terrance Ferguson's Return Will 'Take Some Time'
The Los Angeles Rams may be without another player, as tight end Terrance Ferguson is a ways from still returning.
Forge Nano to Trade on NASDAQ as NANO After Completing Business Combination with Archimedes Tech SPAC Partners II Co.
Forge Nano common stock and warrants expected to begin trading on NASDAQ on October 22, 2026 under the symbols “NANO” and “NANOW,” respectivelyPublic listing positions Forge Nano to accelerate growth across semiconductor manufacturing equipment and advanced battery technologies DENVER, Oct. 21, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Forge Nano, Inc., a leading U.S.-based semiconductor equipment and advanced materials company pioneering Atomic Layer Deposition (“ALD”) technology for artificial intelligence (“A
Pedri: Lamine Yamal shouldn't be compared to Lionel Messi
Pedri believes Lamine Yamal should not be compared to anyone, insisting that measuring the youngster against Lionel Messi is "complicated" because it means comparing him to "the best player in history...
Are partisan politics even changing up our accents? They just might be, y’all
Vowels have become the latest players in partisan politics, a barometer of how beliefs and values fit within the old vs. new South.
What happened to Ben Kindel? NHL player suffers 'medical episode' on plane
Pittsburgh Penguins forward Ben Kindel was taken to a Utah hospital Tuesday after suffering a "medical episode" on the team plane.
Sony Exits UHD Blu-ray Player Market as Pull Back from Physical Media Continues
Won't be restocked with no replacement on the way
Miami-Dade Small Business Program: New opportunities
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... For a small business owner, winning a government contract can be a significant milestone — obtaining steady revenue, scaling up your business, and achieving long-term growth. In Miami-Dade County, an important first step for many businesses is becoming certified through the county’s Small Business Development programs. Today, Miami-Dade County […]
Kansas City Chiefs React to Patrick Mahomes’ Career News
The Kansas City Chiefs have another reason to celebrate Patrick Mahomes after the franchise quarterback reached a career milestone that places him alongside one of the NFL’s greatest players. His latest achievement reinforces his remarkable consistency and highlights how quickly he has established himself among the league’s elite signal-callers. Mahomes tied Tom Brady for the […] The post Kansas City Chiefs React to Patrick Mahomes’ Career News appeared first on Gridiron Heroics.
Dispatch Sells 5M Copies, AdHoc Sets Live Concert for 1-Year Anniversary
AdHoc Studio's narrative superhero adventure game 'Dispatch' has over 5 million players in its first year, and it's celebrating with a live concert event.
Why an Oregon high school football player was ejected from rivalry game before kickoff
Video shows the player violently shove an opposing player who was running onto the field carrying the American flag.
Titans RB Julius Chestnut named AFC Special Teams Player of the Week
Tennessee Titans' Julius Chestnut earns AFC Special Teams Player of the Week honors after a game changing block against the Colts.
Lakers Depth Chart For Final Roster After Dalton Knecht Release
T he news of the Los Angeles Lakers releasing Dalton Knecht confirms the final roster entering the NBA regular season. Bronny James and Jaden Hardy survived the cut and will make the roster to keep their jobs. Knecht was not expected to get strong playing time, but he removes a player who could give the […] The post Lakers Depth Chart For Final Roster After Dalton Knecht Release appeared first on HEAVY.
Post-Shanghai ATP Power Rankings: Alexander Zverev Takes Charge
As you already know, this is not the ATP rankings list; rather, these are ATP power rankings that combine 2026 results, recent form, performance against elite opposition, current fitness, and the level each player is realistically capable of producing during the final stretch of the season. The picture has changed considerably since our pre-Wimbledon rankings. …
Rams Get Devastating Injury News on Multiple Stars
The Los Angeles Rams suffered three long-term injuries to key position player groups during their loss to the Arizona Cardinals on Sunday. The post Rams Get Devastating Injury News on Multiple Stars appeared first on LA Sports Report.
Indoor golf facilities a booming business across the state
Indoor golf is booming in Delaware as Flight Indoor Golf and Back Nine Golf open, expand, and draw year-round players.
New Orleans Pelicans Decide on Options of Four Young Players
The New Orleans Pelicans are keeping their young talent around as they exercised three options on Tuesday.
P2 Physio Founder Luis Ferrer Joins Vanessa Certain for Pinecrest Business Spotlight
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Luis Ferrer, MPT, CSCS, Founder & CEO of P2 Physio, is the featured guest in this Pinecrest Business Association interview hosted by Vanessa Certain, Owner of VEC Development. Ferrer’s professional background spans physical therapy, strength and conditioning, and healthcare leadership. He earned his master’s degree in physical therapy from […]
Brief Bengals injury updates hint at Week 7 vs. Ravens
The first look at some Bengals injury news and a sick player for Week 7.
The Arizona race for governor revealing rifts in Latter-day Saint politics
The Republican crusade to reclaim control of Arizona has come to a head this year, and some of the key players involved in the race are BYU grads.
The Daily Mauling: 10/22/26
Kansas Jayhawks News Kansas hosted Louisville for an exhibition last night. The KC Star has a write up on how it went 247’s Michael Swain takes you through everything Bill Self and the players said at media day Tre White made it very clear exactly why he came back to Kansas. He wants to win […]
FNCS Solos Last Chance Qualifier in NA West: Session 1
Keep your FNCS Solos journey alive in the Last Chance Qualifier! LCQ Round 1 is open to eligible players who participated in an FNCS Solos Qualifier Round 1 session but have not already advanced to the LCQ Final or the FNCS Solos Finals. Players will compete in a single three-hour session with up to 11 matches. After the session concludes, the top 70 players in each region will advance to the LCQ Final. The LCQ Final lasts approximately two and a half hours and features up to five matches. Every match provides a direct path to the Finals: the player who earns the Victory Royale will receive 1,000 points and immediately qualify for the FNCS Solos Finals. Once qualified through a Victory Royale, that player may not compete in any remaining LCQ Final matches. After the LCQ Final concludes, the next 17 highest-scoring players who have not earned a Victory Royale will also advance to the FNCS Solos Finals. This is your last chance to secure a spot—good luck and have fun!
Cam Heyward Once Again Elected to Esteemed Post for Steelers
The Pittsburgh Steelers have elected Cam Heyward as their NFL Players Association player representative, per source. Outside linebacker Alex Highsmith, […]
3 Things I Don’t Have To Worry About
I could use an off week. I don’t know about you, but the last 3 Georgia games have not been easy to consume. (Okay, the 2H of Vandy was fairly smooth going down, but it took a while to get there). I may not be as bruised and battered as the Bulldog players, but I […]
Sony reportedly exits UHD Blu-ray player market
Has discontinued its last remaining player, UBP-X700/K
PlayStation Founder Understands Why Players Want to Keep Physical Media Alive
'I really understand that mentality'
Sundar Pichai: Google’s Frontier Imperative, Compute Scarcity Dilemmas, Future AI Products and Businesses
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has little patience for doubts about Google’s willingness or capacity to compete at the frontier of AI. His company’s latest Gemini 4 Argon model — long-promised and recently delivered — beats OpenAI and Anthropic’s latest public models on coding, math, science, and knowledge-work benchmarks and has placed Google’s AI back among the world’s best. Amid chatter that Google was fine with good-enough lightweight ‘Flash’ models, Pichai pushed back hard against any suggestion that company is limiting its research ambitions. “We won’t do it any other way,” he told me in a Big Technology Podcast interview recorded this week at Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Pursuing cutting-edge research is costly for Google, requiring compute and chips that otherwise could be sold at a high markup by its cloud business. But Pichai said allocating resources to frontier AI development is “ground zero” for Google. “Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development,” Pichai told me. In our conversation, we discussed Argon (which Pichai says processed three times as many tokens as Gemini 3 in the 72 hours after launch), AI’s role in developing better models, the AI interface of the future, competition with OpenAI, Google’s partnerships with Anthropic and Apple, data centers in space, and the nature of his optimism. You can read the full conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, below, or listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice. Alex Kantrowitz: Google is back at the frontier with Gemini 4 Argon, which beats OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s public models on benchmarks spanning coding, math, science, and knowledge work. The conventional wisdom was that Google had given up on the frontier to focus on fast, good-enough models for its products. That was wrong? Sundar Pichai: Very wrong. Look, we are so committed to being at the frontier. It’s in our DNA. We won’t do it any other way. We’ve been thinking about the AI frontier for well over a decade now. The frontier is very dynamic. It’s very competitive. It’s very exciting. I couldn’t be more pleased with how Argon has come together. We took our time with it. We made sure we tested it safely and deployed it carefully. We took a bit longer than our other models, given its capabilities. Across the board, be it for agentic work, knowledge work, coding, creative tasks, Argon is one of the really good frontier models. The first 72 hours since we launched, it’s almost up to 25 trillion tokens used, which is about three times what Gemini 3.0 had in the first 72 hours. And we are capacity constrained as we are serving it. Excited, but there are always areas….. You know, the frontier is very dynamic, and you have to keep evolving the models. There are areas which we can see we need to improve as well. We’ll be at work on all of that as well. Which areas? On any given model, Argon would be across the board better at everything if you just look even two months back. But the space is so evolving. Even on coding, for example, there are pockets where we know we need to do better, and there’s clear feedback. We’ll make it better. The argument for standard models is that they’re already good enough to build great products, with the frontier valuable only for certain tasks. Meta built Muse with good models rather than the best, and Google could put standard models into Maps, Gmail, and Search. Why isn’t that sufficient? It’s definitely not how I have thought about it at all. We are deeply committed to driving the state of the art and actually pushing where this technology can go, all the way from transformers. That’s a journey we’ve been on. You will see us continue to do that. When you’re at the frontier, you get an earlier look into the emerging capabilities, earlier than others, which helps you better prepare for the future. We are fortunate to have a wide set of opportunities across consumer and enterprise. Some of our cloud customers, for sure, want the model at the frontier. The frontier models will be better at developing the next set of models in an era of recursive self-improvement. I would argue it matters there. Internally, we have definitely seen a steep point of inflection by deploying Argon to our developers. It definitely tackles problems which our previous models could not do. Being at the frontier puts you at the innovation frontier and helps you drive that as well. There is room for models of all sizes and capabilities. That’s why we did Flash, Flash-Lite, etc. I agree with you that you can develop very good product experiences with not necessarily the most frontier model, because they tend to be slower and more expensive too. But we care about the Pareto frontier, and we’re committed to doing all of that. You said developing frontier models gives you a look at what’s coming. What do you see on the horizon? What makes this moment so exciting is you build something which you think is a culmination of months of work, and you put it out. You already see clear headroom ahead. We’ve all been working on these agentic, long-horizon capabilities, but clearly the frontier is going to have multiple of these agents working together to do things. That’s an example of an exciting paradigm underway. It’s also clear to me that users, both in consumer and enterprise, will have access to some multi-agent framework for them, working all the time doing things. It feels like a moment of infinite possibilities. Sergey Brin said one of Argon’s core innovations was relying more on the model to help develop the model. Yet incidents involving OpenAI’s bots breaking containment and Google’s bots accessing a site they shouldn’t have suggest these systems still aren’t perfectly aligned. Isn’t there reasonable cause for concern about accelerating toward recursive self-improvement? There are three parts to your question. Let’s first talk about RSI itself. You’re right, Sergey mentioned RSI being a critical contributor as we are developing Argon. But to be very clear, today, in a continuum, we are pretty far from the end state of RSI or something like that. The right way to describe it is you have RSI loops along with AI researchers in various aspects of model development. You almost have agents helping AI researchers in some automated way work together to build these models. It’s good to at least understand where we are today, and it’s super exciting. I expect that continuum to keep making progress as we go into next year. The second question is around safety. Security comes from defense in depth. You’re talking about alignment, obviously. We all are doing a lot of work to make sure the models are as aligned as possible. But it’s an active area of research, and there are clear gaps. That’s not the only thing we rely on. You have the work you do on alignment, but beyond that, we put a lot of effort into real-time monitoring as these models are working. Making sure you have good telemetry into what’s happening so that you can intervene in real time if you see unexpected behaviors. How you do that, the architecture with which you do that, how you make sure it’s all sandboxed and isolated in a way that it can continue doing its job during real-time monitoring — these are all areas of investment. Obviously, when we deploy these models, giving customers, enterprises, control, both with real-time monitoring, but their ability to decide where they deploy, what type of data which models ever have access to, etc. All that work is very, very important, and we are doing a lot of that. As an industry, we need to constantly up our game and take the time to do all this stuff, including dedicating the compute required to make sure you can safely deploy these models. The third part is: Is it all enough? This is why there are a lot of conversations in the industry, and I think it’s reasonable to be worried. The right way to approach something you worry about is early on thinking about what more we can do. As an industry, you’re definitely seeing increased levels of work on alignment, testing for safety, etc., as we deploy these models. The next step would be developing better standards so there are cross-industry standards of how we do these things, including the ability to evaluate using independent evaluators. If you look at areas like financial controls, we have accounting standards, we have independent auditors. Those are all the next natural steps for us as an industry to work toward, and regulation will end up playing a role as we go through all of that as well. Google pursues both language models and world models, while some other AI companies like OpenAI have focused more heavily on LLMs as the path to AGI. Why is world-model research important to you? As humans, you obviously perceive the world around you, and you’re taking all those inputs. Making sure these models are able to understand the laws of physics, simulate the world in high fidelity. All that, I think, are key enabling blocks for intelligence. We are working across all possible applications of this. Take an area like robotics. It’s not an accident: If you look at embodied reasoning benchmarks, Argon is state of the art. That all comes from our experience building world models. Inherently, I would expect there will be architectures which will converge all of this in the future. But for us, we view this as, today, this jagged frontier that is intelligence. We want to be at the frontier of all the possible approaches, and that will help us both drive better research, better insights, and develop a much better AGI model, is how we think about it. Some people argue Google should focus on selling its computing resources rather than using them for AI research. Cloud wants to sell compute at a high markup, while researchers need a very big computer to build the best models. How do you balance those demands? Ground zero for us is making sure we are investing in the compute that’s needed to be at the AI frontier. In 2015, I set the company to be AI-first. AI is that key horizontal ingredient across everything we do, all the way from Search to Cloud to Waymo. That is ground zero for us, making sure both for research and developing the models that we have enough compute needed. Beyond that, we have these independent businesses which each have their own long-range plans. They’re using those long-range plans to project forward, and we plan for compute for all of them. The cloud team, they have a business and they have a projection and they have demand signals. They have committed contracts. With that help, we can plan on a long-term compute trajectory for them. We’re fortunate to have this wide set of opportunities. There’s no company in the world which isn’t making trade-offs at any given moment in time. But the first principles we operate on is making sure we have enough compute to invest in the frontier, and that’s non-negotiable, and everything else works on top. Remember, we are building our own compute, our own data centers. There are long lead times. The compute we have today is a function of decisions I made in 2024. Even if you think back to a year from today, last year the agentic coding takeoff hadn’t happened. Today, obviously, when you sit and look at anything, everyone is short—not just us, other companies—and everyone wishes you had two times what you had planned for. That comes with the territory. At any given moment in time, we are planning for what we would need two to three years out in the future. You’re going to find some decisions you make may look suboptimal two years out, depending on where the state of the art is. I don’t spend too much time thinking about it. The way I think about compute allocation is making sure Google DeepMind, both for research and frontier model development, is cutting edge in terms of compute access. After that, we plan for all our businesses. It’s great we can provide our compute to other people too, like we have done. It allows us to scale that up, get real tests for it in the widest application set possible, test it in the real world, and make sure we are at the cutting edge of technology at every layer of our AI stack as well. Ben Horowitz relayed on a podcast that Andy Jassy had said compute was sold out until 2028. Are you seeing the same thing? If today a customer is coming out and asking us for compute in ’27, that is incredibly difficult to do. Even last year we went out and leased some short-term compute to accommodate some customers and help them out. But yes, we are all dealing with similar timelines. Every major technology shift seems to involve overbuilding, from railroads to fiber. Do you think that’s happening here? It depends on the time frames you’re looking at. This level of build, if I take a long enough time frame, it makes complete sense to me. We are at early stages of the most consequential technology ever, and this is not like fiber. It’s not dark. We are using it. We are capacity constrained on a daily basis. The applications, the underlying technology is improving rapidly. But running a company, the way I work through the moment is you look at your demand signals. You look at your committed revenue opportunities that you’re getting in the form of contracts. You balance that with the underlying technical capability, or internally you balance how we are using it internally, the model trajectories. Based on all that, you take a disciplined approach—a confident, aggressive, but disciplined approach—to plan out compute. But when you talk about the broader economy as a whole, you’re having people operate with various levels of risk. I focus on what I can control as a company and plan through it. If your question is, can there be an overbuild? Yes, because you can have some constrained components. Remember, what matters is a set of everything you need to build out that compute. Memory, electricity, electricians…. Land. Like 2,000 components or more. You could get constrained at some point. There could be things which cause bottlenecks, and then you could have overbuilds. There could be external shocks to the economy. There are macro risks. All that is possible at any given time. But am I confident that the compute we are planning for, we will have uses for it given enough time? Absolutely, yes. I was in the room when you said AI would be as profound as fire and electricity. If you believe that, shouldn’t you give researchers the biggest possible computer, even at the expense of today’s cloud profits? We’re all doing some form of that. Our cloud business is at any given moment in time forgoing short-term revenues because we are making compute trade-offs to support frontier AI development. What you’re seeing is true already. But you want to be thoughtful. Even our AI researchers have some constraints, which are also good. That’s what inspires creativity. That’s what helps you come up with a more efficient algorithmic breakthrough, maybe to use less memory. What we are committed to is to invest what’s needed to stay at the frontier. OpenAI President Greg Brockman told me a few months ago that the ideal AI product might have no interface at all—just as natural as conversation. What do you think the interface looks like in the age of AI? Computing historically has been humans adapting to computing. With AI, it’ll be the other way around. The technology will adapt seamlessly to how humans live and go about their day-to-day life. You want to be able to speak to that AI when you want to. It has context. It can be persistently running somewhere, give you continuity. You’re not dealing with a lot of complexity. It’s natural. All that makes sense to me. That doesn’t mean it won’t have any interface, however. Nowadays, even on my phone, Gemini voice models are so good. I can just press the microphone button. I can just ramble. That’s why we call it Rambler. I can ramble. It intelligently corrects with my personal context. Even my friends’ names, weird names, it gets it right, even if it first guesses it wrong. It’s amazing. I’m not going in, backspacing, editing once I finish saying it. It’s remarkable how good it’s gotten. But there are going to be moments you will need an interface. You may want to entertain yourself. You may want to watch a video. You may ask your AI to create something, and you want to watch it, consume it. The way I think about it is, you want it to be as seamless and as natural as possible, and that you are not doing the hard work adapting to whatever the interface is. The technology is adapting to how you’re working at any given moment in time. When I asked Sam Altman about competition from Google, he argued that OpenAI was building AI-native products and implied Google was bolting AI onto existing ones. Do you accept that framing, and can a “bolt-on” compete with an AI-native product? First of all, it’s a very dynamic moment. We are all pushing each other. OpenAI has pushed us as a company too. This is not just we are doing something to them. Far from it. Yes, Google went into its own version of a code red too. In the AI moment, all of us have to respond with varying levels of urgency at any given moment in time. We are constantly building new products as well. Gemini was built from the ground up as a product—the Gemini app I’m talking about. Or tomorrow, as all of us are adapting to agents, are you bolting agents onto ChatGPT, or are they building it natively? How would you think about that? You can always put these questions back. I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as you want to build world-class product experiences that are AI-native and they are winning. Some of it is adapting products, some of it is rethinking new experiences. They will all be part of how you approach this moment. How do you expect to make money from these AI interfaces? If an agent recommends a product and I buy it, should it take a cut of the sale, even if that’s disclosed? I’m going to put enterprise aside. Consumers are going to increasingly value this technology. Take software developers today. Developers are willing to pay for these coding models because it really helps make them more productive. Nobody would want to code the way they were coding three years ago, or even the same time last year. When you’re delivering value, there’s value to be had. I’ve never seen examples where consumer products really scale to billions of users, where people are using it intensely, and haven’t had monetization to go along with it. If you’re providing value to people, there is inherent value to be had. The nature of it may change. You’re asking a scenario in which agents are doing stuff for you. At the end of the day, you will have commercial needs. The agents need to fulfill those commercial needs. The providers on the other side are going to see value in that. There’s going to be some mechanism by which it gets fleshed out. That’s what an efficient system does. But what matters is that you’re building those world-class consumer experiences. I promised myself one product feature request: Can you make Gemini-powered search in Gmail as good as searching Gmail through ChatGPT? What’s going on here? One of the exciting things we announced recently is the unified Gemini agent for enterprise, and we’re bringing that to consumers. These are persistent agents which run 24/7 in the cloud. We’re spinning up a micro VM effectively for every query, and from the runtime, the harness, the model—it’s all a headless service. It’ll work everywhere, and it has your context with you. You can address this agent whether you’re in Workspace, in Search, in Gemini. Agents are going to drive this unification from a customer experience, which people are looking for. When you have a broad product portfolio and you’re moving forward fast, there are always areas where you’re moving forward faster than some other areas. That’s valid feedback. But we are putting a lot of time and effort into making sure, as we build out our agentic experience, that unification and that capability works well across all these services. People have asked where Google’s equivalent of Muse or Dots is. Do you anticipate creating a new product to compete with them? Our goal with Gemini is to be a personal, proactive, and powerful assistant. That’s what we are working toward. You saw us describe the early versions of it at Google I/O this year with Spark. Effectively, already, if you open the Gemini app as a Pro or an Ultra user, you see Chat and Task, and they start giving you that agentic experience. With Argon now, that capability is dramatically accelerated. What we announced recently in our enterprise event, we are bringing that to consumers as well. Soon in Gemini, you will be able to ask something, and it’s a continuum. You don’t need to think about whether you’re asking a chat or an agentic task. It’ll just automatically do the right thing, and it can work persistently in the background securely and get things done for you. Already, empirically, when I look at what’s coming into Gemini in our app, last year you would have tagged them and most of them would have been chats. But a steadily growing percentage is already agentic tasks in Gemini. Yes, we are going to bring personal agents to our consumers. It’ll work in the Gemini app. It’ll work in Google Search. It’ll work in Gmail. You can address it, call it, etc. We want to make sure we’re getting it right. It’ll be powered by Argon, and we are very excited to bring it to our users. Google has invested and committed tens of billions of dollars to Anthropic. What do you see in Dario Amodei that makes you want such a deep investment and partnership? Very early on, when we looked at the founding team of Anthropic, it was very clear to us this was a world-class team which was involved in some of the earliest GPT models. We were quickly able to assess that they would be at the frontier. We’ve always tried to identify and partner with companies which would be at the cutting edge of technology. We’ve done that with SpaceX. We’ve done that with Anthropic. That’s what we saw, and we had a chance to partner. Is your partnership with Apple to license Gemini for Siri expanding, contracting, or standing still? For both us and Apple, that partnership was about translating the capabilities of AI into better experiences for users. I thought Apple has done a phenomenal job of incorporating—they customize these models and build it into Siri—and it’s been great to see the reception. We are committed to doing more. You’re going to do more with them? There’s nothing specific to comment, but it’s a partnership. It’s working well. What have you learned so far about the feasibility of data centers in space? It’s a very exciting project. Projects like this remind me—I still recall that moment in the desert for the DARPA Grand Challenge, watching the Stanley car compete in it, which ended up being the basis for Waymo. With all these technologies, you’re at a moment in time where it looks a bit like sci-fi, but 10 to 20 years down the line, it’s actually working in a meaningful way. I feel the same in space. We’ve always believed in betting big on these technologies. Quantum has been a great example of it. We’re probably 10 years into the journey. Waymo, we are almost 20 years into the journey. Space, we are two to three years into the journey. It’s clear to me that it’s an approach which will make a lot of sense in the future. Being in sub-synchronous orbits with 24/7 access to the most abundant form of energy we have access to will make a lot of sense for this exponential increase in compute that we are going to need. Having said that, this is a challenging project. The team has disciplined milestones. It was a super exciting milestone to send the TPUs up to space. Sometime, as we are speaking, we are expecting a “hello world” moment from them. I look forward to seeing that happen, and we’ll continue investing here too. You previously said 25% of the code written within Google was written by AI. What’s the number today? That number in our world today is meaningless in the sense that every part of what we now touch is influenced by AI deeply. What we are tracking with Argon, for example, it’s been a point of inflection. People are using Argon to really go tackle complex projects, including projects which affect millions of lines of code. In the four weeks since we have launched Argon, we have seen a 30% increase in CLs, and more importantly, almost a similar increase—a one-third decrease in rollbacks. People are writing code more productively and better code with it. We are tracking it with newer metrics now. How are you dealing with opposition to data centers? If you can’t build in the U.S. the way you want to, where else do you go? We’re very committed to building our data centers very responsibly. When I look at our largest data centers in some of the communities where we have been the longest, I visit them, I talk to people. There are people who come and tell us their kids have gone to college because of our investments in these communities, and we’ve grown in those communities. To me, this is about doing it right. Engaging with the communities early, doing it transparently. We are committed to making sure we are bringing incremental power, and we cover 100% of the cost of our power needs for these projects. It’s understanding the impact on neighborhoods and making sure you’re working thoroughly to address them. Done rightly, you can continue making progress. But we are constantly taking feedback into account. I do worry not everyone operates the same way. People have been surprised by data centers showing up in their backyard. Those are all important. As an industry, we should continue to do better. But part of the reason, in a 20-year time frame, we are thinking about things like data centers in space is making sure we are able to put these data centers where maybe the trade-offs will be different. What unproven area of AI is Google working hardest to crack? Is it continual learning—getting models to keep updating after release—or something else? There are multiple parallel paths. You saw with Argon we have a million output tokens. With our Gemini models early on, we had a one-million context window on the input side. These are all examples of breakthroughs we are constantly working on. How do you think about synthetic data? How do you think about continual learning? How do you think about more efficient architectures? We do dedicate a meaningful percentage of our compute to these research bets too. It always goes hand in hand, including our world models. Those are all bets we are placing. Sometimes, as part of these bets, there are ideas that emerge which just make their way into the mainline models. Maybe we don’t fully talk about it, but we have multiple steps in these areas. Working in technology requires optimism that building something will improve the world, but those bets can leave real consequences when they fail. I recently returned to a town in El Salvador where enthusiasm for Bitcoin had given way to unfinished construction and something resembling a ghost town. How do you maintain the optimism you spoke about in your Stanford commencement address while accounting for those risks? I genuinely have a deep conviction that improving technology and improving access to technology makes people’s lives better. It’s been my personal experience in my life, out of which comes that deep conviction, optimism. But with that, I’ve always felt humanity’s journey is always about working hard to harness that technology to make it work well for society. The optimism is not an optimism that you just build whatever you want, whenever. You work hard to make sure you’re building technology in the service of humanity, to make the human condition better. That’s got to be the defining goal as we are approaching it. With that framework, I’m very, very optimistic. We are in very early stages of the kind of progress that we are going to see on many areas. We’re all talking about areas like healthcare. A lot of the progress is ahead. The ability to make things in a fundamentally cheaper way on many things where things have been getting expensive for a long, long time, discovering new materials, etc., which really bend the curve—it’s tough to step today and understand the impact of all that, but they’re going to be very profound. I’m very optimistic, but we have to be rightfully concerned about all the ways this technology can go wrong. Sundar, I know you don’t do many of these. Thank you. Thanks, Alex. Appreciate it.
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