Google AI Updates: August 7, 2026

1. DeepMind’s WeatherNext Sets New Benchmark for Cyclone Forecasting

Google. Google DeepMind unveiled WeatherNext, an AI model that predicts tropical cyclone track, intensity, and wind structure from a single system and gives forecasters roughly one additional day of lead time, with three-day forecasts matching the quality of prior two-day predictions. The work, published in Nature, operates on coarse 28x28km resolution data yet successfully anticipated Hurricane Melissa’s rapid intensification and landfall in Jamaica during the 2025 season. DeepMind open-sourced the models and code on GitHub and released a compact WeatherNext 2-mini via free Colab notebooks, letting meteorological agencies, researchers, and nonprofits build localized forecasting tools. Source

2. Google Maps Gains Agentic Features for Food Orders and Hotel Bookings

Google. Google Maps added agentic capabilities that let it complete tasks such as ordering food and booking hotels directly within the app rather than handing users off to third-party sites. The update pushes agentic AI into one of Google’s highest-traffic consumer surfaces and turns a navigation product into a transactional assistant, with implications for how merchants surface inventory to AI intermediaries. Source