A person following a mobile phone map navigation tool whilst walking around a town - Google Maps street walk

A person following Google Maps while walking around Valencia, Spain, February 19, 2026

Google Maps is getting a new AI-powered “Ask Maps” feature

Will Gemini be enough to hush the Apple Maps heads?

3/13/26 6:53AM

Updated 4/2/26 6:20AM

For those of us who weren’t sure we’d heard enough about chatbots and how they can find their way into all facets of modern life, Alphabet announced on Thursday that it would be integrating Gemini into Google Maps.

Bot-seat driver

As part of its “biggest navigation upgrade in over a decade,” the new “Ask Maps” feature will allow users to ask more sophisticated questions in the Google Maps app, providing chill-sounding use cases like, “My friends are coming from Midtown East to meet me after work. Any spots with a cozy aesthetic and a table for 4 at 7 tonight?”

Anyone with a decent handle on their local area and a tight grasp of Google Maps’ “Saved Places” feature might balk at that request, but other examples like phone-charging spots that aren’t busy coffee shops, or new trip-planning capabilities, could prove genuinely useful.

However, whether Alphabet plumbing its chatbot into the Google Maps app will be enough to win over fans of its biggest rivals in the navigation game is another matter entirely.

iCan do better

With Google Maps having been seen by many as the superior option for a while, social media users have revisited the maps debate of late, pitting the Alphabet product against Apple’s version on purely aesthetic grounds. Some of the results are pretty damning. Exhibit A:

Apple Maps is leaps and bounds ahead of Google Maps pic.twitter.com/blRiW08WK0
— Apple Design (@TheAppleDesign) February 21, 2026

And — in what maybe feels like a slightly less fair, but equally damaging, point of comparison — exhibit B:

Google Maps vs. Apple Maps 💀 pic.twitter.com/aCg67nvELl
— 📁 (@jvepng) March 2, 2026

But whether you prefer the default map that comes with an iPhone, the one that’s built into Android devices, or some secret (probably more practical) third thing, the contest between the first two definitely seems to be getting more intense recently... at least, if social media buzz is anything to go by.

However, in terms of actual usage, Google's lead remains formidable. Search data suggests that “google maps” is still searched for far more than “apple maps” is, and App Store data shows that the iPhone version of Google Maps has 7.1 million reviews, with an average rating of 4.7, while Apple's own has just 51,000 reviews with a measly 2.4 stars.

Correction: The original version of this story included a misleading chart comparing traffic to maps.google.com versus maps.apple.com based on Similarweb data. Similarweb clarifies that only a tiny fraction of Google Maps traffic passes through maps.google.com -- most goes through google.com/maps. In other words, the bulk of web traffic related to Google Maps was not reflected in the chart, which appeared to show Apple Maps catching up with Google Maps on the web.

Rani Molla

Meta is supercharging its subscription businesses

The free-app giant never really cared about recurring revenue. Now, it’s launching paid plans for all sorts of stuff.

Jon Keegan4h

FT: Anthropic staff helping the NSA use Mythos for offensive cyberattacks

Anthropic’s Mythos AI model was deemed too dangerous to release to the public, with the company citing its ability to orchestrate novel cyberattacks.

And that’s just what the National Security Agency is doing, with the help of Anthropic staff embedded at the agency, according to a report from the Financial Times.

Only a small number of companies and US allies have been given access to the advanced model, which means America’s adversaries have not had the chance to shore up their defenses against the AI model’s new offensive capabilities.

The arrangement is especially unusual as the Pentagon has deemed Anthropic’s AI a national security supply chain risk — effectively blacklisting it for defense work — in response to the company’s refusal to allow its technology to be used for any legal application, which could include autonomous killing or mass surveillance. Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the determination.

US National Security Agency using Anthropic’s Mythos for cyber attacks

Rani Molla5h

Longtime Tesla bear JPMorgan upgraded Tesla and raised its price target to $475 from $145

For more than a decade, JPMorgan was Wall Street’s most stubborn Tesla skeptic, anchored by auto analyst Ryan Brinkman’s strict focus on traditional car fundamentals and near-term delivery numbers.

But JPM recently handed coverage of the stock to a new analyst, Rajat Gupta, who is throwing that playbook out the window. In a note Friday, the firm upgraded Tesla to “neutral” from “underweight” and raised its price target 228% to $475 from $145. (The analyst consensus on FactSet is $403.) Instead of focusing on the company’s struggling vehicle business, the new analyst is orienting himself more toward Tesla’s idea of the future, now modeling Tesla’s physical AI and robotaxi fleets all the way out to the year 2040.

Here are the main reasons for the capitulation:

Looking past the car lot: Gupta argues that Tesla “is at the forefront of physical AI, entering uncharted TAMs” and therefore “deserves the benefit of the doubt to be valued on LT earnings potential” rather than near-term speed bumps.
Unmatched vertical integration: Tesla’s control over everything from battery cells to custom silicon gives it a massive moat. JPM notes this starting point advantage is “unmatched at an industrial level scale” and “still somewhat under-appreciated and misunderstood.”
The AWS flywheel effect: Deploying Optimus robots inside its own factories “should not only lower COGS for the base automotive business, but more importantly, help validate the product at an industrial scale.” Gupta called it “a classic flywheel effect, somewhat analogous to AWS and Kiva at AMZN.”

For Tesla bulls who have argued for years that this is an AI company and not a carmaker, JPM’s sudden $3.9 trillion valuation model is the ultimate validation.

Anthropic ponders self-improving AI

Anthropic says Claude already writes 80% of its code. A new post asks what happens when the models can improve themselves — and whether anyone could stop them.

Jon Keegan5h

Tom Jones & Millie Giles6/4/26

ChatGPT hit 1 billion users nearly twice as fast as TikTok did

It took Facebook and Instagram around eight years; it took YouTube just over six; even TikTok, which at the time felt like it was a global sensation almost as soon as it arrived, took more than half a decade.

Now, though, the mobile version of ChatGPT has positively left the biggest platforms (and all of your other favorite apps) in the dust, hitting 1 billion monthly active users in just three years, per new data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, as more users turn to OpenAI’s chatbot each month.

ChatGPT 1 billion users chart — Sherwood News

While rival Anthropic might be pulling ahead in terms of annualized recurring revenue, enterprise customer adoption, and valuation, the app version of Claude, a market-leading chatbot on several counts, has clocked only 56 million monthly active users in the quarter to date.

In fact, according to Abe Yousef, a senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, ChatGPT’s monthly active user count for the quarter to date outweighs the figures for Claude, Gemini (472 million), Doubao (106 million), Dola (78 million), DeepSeek (68 million), Meta AI (61 million), Grok (50 million), Perplexity (44 million), and Copilot (31 million)... combined.

ChatGPT made a pretty big splash in the tech world when it landed toward the end of 2022, but there’s no question that the mobile versions — which launched on iOS in May 2023, then on Android a couple months later — helped to catapult the chatbot into the mainstream proper.