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.

Jon Keegan

Altman: We do “weird” things like building massive data centers so there will be “universal prosperity”

OpenAI’s CEO spelled out the company’s principles for AGI in a blog post.

12th Breakthrough Prize Ceremony - Arrivals

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Let Tim Cook

Apple is on its way to becoming the biggest smartphone seller in China

The memory crunch has made iPhones a more popular alternative as competitors’ prices rise.

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Microsoft loses exclusive access to OpenAI’s models and tools while ending revenue-sharing deal with ChatGPT maker

Microsoft shares dropped as it announced a revised agreement with OpenAI.

The amended agreement ends revenue-sharing payments from Microsoft to OpenAI, and also ends Microsoft’s exclusive access to OpenAI’s intellectual property (i.e. models and products).

OpenAI’s revenue sharing with Microsoft will end in 2030, is subject to a total cap, and is no longer dependent on its achieving artificial general intelligence.

Amazon, a likely beneficiary of this lack of exclusivity, initially popped on the news but erased those gains.

This is a developing story.

The next phase of the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership - The Official Microsoft Blog

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China just blew up one of Meta’s key AI bets

China has ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of Manus, a Chinese startup (since relocated to Singapore) that makes AI agents and was central to Meta’s push to turn its massive AI investments into a real business. The move is part of the Chinese government’s effort to stop US firms from gaining access to Chinese talent and intellectual property, as Washington continues to restrict sales of advanced AI chips to Chinese companies.

Unlike its tech peers, which can sell AI through cloud services, Meta mainly uses AI to improve its existing ad business rather than as a stand-alone revenue driver. The decision strips away one of Meta’s clearest paths to monetizing AI — leaving it spending like a hyperscaler, without a hyperscaler business model.

China blocks Meta's $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus

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DeepSeek releases new V4 series models highlighting efficiency and long context

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released a major new version of its eponymous open-source AI models that are nipping at the heels of leading frontier models in some areas.

The most significant DeepSeek-V4 Pro and DeepSeek-V4 Flash both have a 1 million-token context — the amount of information the model can actively work with in a single session — which is a crucial feature for complex, long-running coding tasks.

DeepSeek rebuilt how the models process information under the hood, making them substantially more efficient — and that efficiency is what makes the large context window actually usable.

Also, the new models’ coding skills have closed the gap with the major frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google.

The authors of the model acknowledge some of V4’s shortcomings, such as its lower scores on reasoning benchmarks, saying that V4 “trails state-of-the-art frontier models by approximately 3 to 6 months.”

As open-weight models, V4 can be run on any user’s own hardware, making the V4 models among the top-performing open-source models out there. V4’s large context and token efficiency are especially significant among open-source models.

But like with earlier DeepSeek models, don’t ask it about Tiananmen Square.

DeepSeek Unveils Flagship AI Model a Year After Breakthrough