Does Gemini 3.1 Pro Matter?

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, Gemini 3.1 Pro is here, and I think its point is to flex multimodal. Before that in the headlines, a lot of talk about AI in India, but is there anything worth listening to? The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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Lastly, if you want the single coolest job of all time, come apply to be our Clarkitect and work on agentic vibe coding projects with me across the AIDB ecosystem. As always, all of this information is linked at aidedailybrief.ai for easy finding. Today we start with the AI Impact Summit. It's a gathering in New Delhi that has brought together world leaders and AI executives. This is the first time the event has been held in a developing country with previous iterations hosted in the UK, France and South Korea. The selection of India as the host country was symbolically important, allowing the event to platform a political call to address AI inequality. Earlier in the week, a UN report highlighted that AI adoption is still growing more rapidly in the developed world, risking a permanent technological divide. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres wrote in an ex-post, The future of AI cannot be decided by a handful of countries or left to the whims of a few billionaires. AI must belong to everyone. AI must be accessible to everyone. AI must benefit everyone. AI must be safe for everyone. Let's build AI for everyone. In a follow-up post, he called for a global fund on AI to quote, build skills, data, affordable computing power, and inclusive ecosystems everywhere. Now, this is one of the first times we've heard world leaders proclaim the need to deliver affordable AI to the global south. Until now, the discussions have largely been about national or regional interests. By way of example, last year's summit in Paris was squarely focused on European leaders establishing the need to invest and compete in the AI race. This year's event was a shift towards recognizing the need to treat AI as a global public good. The other big theme of the summit was India itself declaring their ambition to become a global AI power. The event featured huge investment commitments from Adani and Reliance Industries, who will each spend more than $100 billion on local data centers over the coming decade. The Indian government also earmarked a $1.1 billion fund to the efforts. Aside from global leaders, the summit also saw tech leaders fly in, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch. Slightly overshadowing other things going on at the event, Bill Gates canceled his keynote because of continued scrutiny over his appearance in the Epstein files. And yet still with all of that, all eyes were on Sam Altman and Dario Amadei. Specifically on one moment where more than a dozen tech leaders joined Prime Minister Modi on stage. The leaders joined hand and raised their arms in celebration, save for Altman and Amadei who refused to hold hands. Bef Jaisos broke down the tape and determined that Dario had been the one to refuse to hold Altman's hand, but regardless who instigated, the moment reflected just how bitter the rivalry has become. While the two were on stage, a chart from Epic AI went viral, suggesting that Anthropic is on a pace to overtake OpenAI in revenue terms by the middle of this year. So with that bombastic framing established, the two AI rivals took to the stage and delivered vastly contrasting speeches. Dario, it must be said, um, denod his way through a generic and well-trodden narrative, read from an iPhone screen. He said nothing he hadn't said before, and many people commented on just how bad it looked for him to be reading off his iPhone. Wrote terminally online engineer on X, the oral loss is crazy. I take back everything good I said about Anthropic. Altman was more eloquent, discussing how the fundamental uncertainty of AI interacts with global issues of democracy, social contracts, and job loss. His major call to action was for global leaders to continue iterative deployment and allow people to access each successive layer of the technology as it unfolded. Offstage in an interview with CNBC, Altman expressed skepticism over the present fear of AI job loss, remarking, I don't know what the exact percentage is, but there's some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there's some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs. Now it is difficult for me to take very seriously these global talkfests. I guess theoretically sometimes genuine action arises from them, but mostly the model is that world leaders arrive, exchange platitudes about the state of the world, and then return to doing exactly what they were already doing. It's about the silly photo op of the arms up of all these people, which was incredibly awkward and weird even if there hadn't been the scruffle between Sam and Dario. Sean Wang, aka Swix, really nailed it in a post he called, Why do AI conferences keep not getting AI? He wrote, I feel for my brothers and sisters in India. This was their big moment on the global stage and perhaps an inflection point for one and a half billion people who will have to figure out their place in the new AI-shaped economy. And yet the powers that be decisively demonstrated that nothing will change. They care more about bad photo ops and hobnobbing with celebrities than they care about the builders that are supposed to drive the Indian AI economy forward. Ultimately, I think the less time you spend caring about what's said at events like this, and the more time you spend on building things, the better off you're going to be. Still, we had a huge portion of the big tech AI leaders and a number of sovereign leaders as well so we couldn't let it pass completely undiscussed. Next up, we shift over to Business World where Walmart is turning to AI as their next big growth driver after a soft earnings result. Past quarter has been a mixed bag for Walmart. They briefly achieved the milestone of becoming a trillion dollar company. However, they also lost the crown as the world's largest company by revenue to Amazon after 17 years on top. This week's earnings report guided lower earnings and revenue growth for the coming year, reflecting the shaky position of the consumer economy. And yet in spite of, or perhaps because of that, the earnings call focused heavily on Walmart's AI transformation strategy. Newly installed CEO John Ferner said, The way we're using technology and AI is helping us create great customer solutions, reduce friction, simplify decision making, and pinpoint where our inventory is, all while maintaining the trust we've earned from our customers and members. Now Walmart has of course been rolling out AI into every corner of their business over the past couple of years. Ferner flagged that their shopping assistant Sparky has shown early promise and will become core to their strategy moving forward. He reported that around half of Walmart's online customers have used Sparky, and that those using the assistant ordered 35% more than those who didn't. US CEO and President David Gugina noted that AI is driving a complete transformation in the way that Walmart thinks about their business. He said, Sparky is essentially helping us evolve from traditional search to intent-driven commerce. From an economic standpoint, better discovery and higher conversion translates into bigger baskets and greater frequency. Sparky is helping customers find the things they need, they want, and they love, and it's strengthening our digital unit economics as it scales. Next up, moving over to the company that dethroned Walmart off the top of the Fortune 500, Amazon is keeping a close eye on AI adoption with new metrics in their employee tracking system. The information reports that Amazon has been using an internal system called Clarity to measure various elements of AI tool use within the company. The system, which is also used to measure other elements of employee performance, is now being used to track overall AI usage by teams, as well as which tools are seeing the most use. The monitoring doesn't just include Amazon's in-house tools, but also external AI products that staff are encouraged to use. The tracking goes well beyond software engineering and standard wide-caller functions, with Amazon also keeping tabs on how the company's supply chain optimization team is making use of AI. While Amazon has maintained that AI was not the direct cause of their massive recent layoffs, the framing of the assessments certainly implies a push to realize AI productivity gains. Employees are asked how they have, quote, accomplished more with less, and for specific examples where they have remained innovative, force-multiplied using AI and delivered results while reducing or not growing headcount. Moving over to the big consulting world, Accenture is laying down the law when it comes to AI use in the workplace, telling senior managers that no AI, no promotion. The consulting giant has begun collecting data on how some senior employees use AI tools and explicitly tied the metrics to career progression. According to an email viewed by the Financial Times, Accenture has told staff that promotion to leadership roles will require regular adoption of AI. You might remember that Accenture embarked last year on one of the more ambitious AI upscaling projects. At the time, CEO Julie Sweet said that the staff who failed to adopt AI workflows will be, quote, exited from the company. This week's email reinforced that initial training is now over and use of AI is a fundamental requirement of the job. It stated, use of our key tools will be a visible input to talent discussions during the summer promotion cycle. In their story about this, Financial Times noted that AI holdouts are becoming a major problem across the consulting industry. Three executives at Big Four accounting and consulting firms said that convincing senior managers and partners to use AI has been a much more difficult task than introducing the tools to junior staff. One executive said that older, more senior figures at the firms are more set in their ways, requiring a carrot and stick approach. It'll be interesting to see how much internal resistance they find. One person familiar with the policy change said they would, quote, quit immediately if it affected them, while another source criticized the quality of the tools deployed at Accenture, describing them as broken-slot generators. In a press statement, Accenture explained the need to keep pushing, commenting, Our strategy is to be the reinvention partner of choice for our clients and to be the most client-focused, AI-enabled great place to work. That requires the adoption of the latest tools and technologies to serve our clients most effectively. And to understand why, you only need glance at Accenture's share price. The stock is down 17% year-to-date and 45% over the past year. Now, this is pretty interesting to me as a bellwether of where corporations might go. I think Hedgy at Hedgy Markets on X probably sums up the feeling of a lot of folks when he writes, If these tools were actually useful, people will just use them. You don't need to track logins and tie them to promotions. The fact that companies are resorting to this tells me adoption isn't happening organically, which raises questions about whether the tools are delivering value or just generating metrics for leadership to point at. I don't think this is necessarily a super cynical take, but I do think it's wrong. The biggest issue that we find across all of our surveys at AI Daily Brief as well as everything we do at Super Intelligent is the problem of time. People inside enterprises report that they don't have time to learn the technology that would save them time. And unfortunately, the vast majority of companies we interact with don't create specific time carve-outs for their people to learn how to use these tools. They simply expect people to figure out that time on their own. That creates a situation where people feel negatively about these tools because they're just another layer of stuff that they have to do, which creates the need for mandates like this. Now to the extent we're talking about tool quality, I do think that in many corporations there is an issue of the tools that are approved for work being pretty far behind what people have access to in their personal lives. Probably the second most frequent complaint we see outside of the I don't have time to learn this stuff is at home I'm using Opus 4.6 and at work I have a terrible old version of Copilot. In any case, I do think that to some extent Accenture is an extreme example of this because of the point that they're making that if they are in the business of bringing this new technology to their people they really kind of need to know about it. But I wouldn't be surprised to see more mandates like this in the months and year to come. For now though that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief Headlines edition. Next up, the main episode.