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Android 17 puts Gemini deeper into Pixel
Plus: Nvidia moves AI NPCs onto the device
Rimsha Bhardwaj, Hasan Toor & Ihtesham Haider
June 17, 2026
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Today, we will talk about these stories:
Unreal gets local AI character tools
Google makes Android more AI-first
WDC gets pulled back into AI
Where to Invest $100,000 Right Now, According to Experts
Investors face a dilemma. When the S&P 500 finished its worst quarter since 2022 last month, diversifiers like bonds and bitcoin fell too.
Even with the turnaround in mid-April, analysts at Goldman Sachs and Vanguard have projected low-single-digit annualized returns from 2024-2034.
Bloomberg asked where experts would personally invest $100,000 for their March monthly edition.
One answer that surfaced for a second time? Art.
It's what billionaires like Bezos and the Rockefellers have privately used to diversify for decades.
Why?
Appreciation. The ArtPrice100 Index outpaced the S&P 500 overall from 2000 to 2025
Low-correlation. The postwar contemporary segment has moved independently of traditional investments like stocks since ‘95.*
Resilience. A scarce, physical, and global asset class with decades of demonstrated demand.
Thanks to the world's premier art investing platform, now anyone can invest in works featuring legends like Banksy, Basquiat, and Picasso, without needing millions.
Shares in new offerings can sell quickly but...
*According to Masterworks data. Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. See important Reg A disclosures at masterworks.com/cd.
Nvidia wants game AI running locally
Image Credits: NVIDIA
A PUBG teammate that listens and responds locally is the real news here.
Nvidia says its ACE Game Agent SDK beta and new Unreal Engine 5 plugins let developers build on-device AI companions with speech recognition, small language models, and text-to-speech. The Total War: PHARAOH advisor uses RAG across 1,200+ interlinked game data tables to answer strategy questions in real time.
This feels practical. The important shift is cost and latency, because cloud NPCs are hard to ship when every conversation adds delay and expense.
Players will notice the sound first: a character answering out loud, inside the match, without the usual pause. Developers may notice something else, which is that NPC behavior now starts to look more like a systems problem than a writing task.
The open question is whether these characters stay useful after the first impressive demo.
Android becomes Google’s AI showcase
Image Credits: Google
Android 17 is doing two jobs at once.
Google released Android 17 and Wear OS 7, with the update landing first on Pixel devices. The Pixel Drop adds Gemini Omni for conversational video editing, Lyria 3 for music generation, and AudioLM translation tools for the Pixel 10a.
This is Google using the phone as its cleanest AI demo surface. I think that matters more than any single feature, because Pixel owners are getting AI tools where they already message, record, translate, and share.
There are practical pieces here too: a bubble bar for recent apps, dual selfie-and-screen recording for TikTok and YouTube, and up to 10% battery gains on Wear OS. The watch also gets emergency detection for crashes, falls, and lack of pulse, which is the kind of feature people remember when the screen lights up at night.
The question is whether Gemini feels helpful daily, or just present everywhere.
AI is lifting storage again
Western Digital did not need a new product announcement to rally.
WDC rose 7% Tuesday after jumping 16% Monday, helped by Morgan Stanley lifting its price target to $650 from $488. The move stood out because Micron, Sandisk, and AMD pulled back after recent highs, while investors also reacted to a US-Iran peace agreement and hopes that oil pressure may ease.
Storage still matters. I think the rally says investors are widening the AI trade beyond chips, looking at the less flashy hardware needed to move and hold data.
The screen probably looked strange Tuesday morning: green on WDC, red across other familiar AI names. That kind of split usually means investors still want AI exposure, but they are getting pickier about where they add risk.
The hard part is knowing whether this is a real storage cycle or another crowded AI chase.
Prohuman team
Covers emerging technology, AI models, and the people building the next layer of the internet. |  Founder |
Writes about how new interfaces, reasoning models, and automation are reshaping human work. |  Founder |
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