What's trending in AI right now, from the app charts to the community feeds. Real links, our take.
AI language tutors are climbing the charts
The AI-powered English tutor BetterSpeak jumped 29 spots in the App Store's Education category this week, one of the bigger single-week climbs in that chart right now. It is part of a broader surge in AI conversation tutors: several similar apps are moving up together. These tools let non-native speakers practice spoken English with an AI coach that corrects grammar and pronunciation in real time, with no scheduling required. For anyone who has wanted to get more speaking practice but keeps running into the cost or logistics of human tutors, this category has gotten genuinely useful fast.
Google's $99 Gemini speaker is drawing viewers
Videos walking through Google's new Home Speaker are trending hard this week, driven by curiosity about what a Gemini-native smart speaker actually does differently. The short answer: it handles multi-step, conversational requests rather than simple one-shot commands, so you can say something like "turn off everything except the kitchen light" and it actually follows along. TechCrunch covered the launch in June, and Google has a full feature overview on its own blog. One thing worth knowing before you order: the headline AI features require a $10/month subscription after a six-month free trial, so the $99 price is the start of the story, not the end.
Publishers are taking Google to court over Gemini's training data
A coalition of major publishers including Hachette and Elsevier filed a class-action lawsuit against Google this week, accusing the company of training Gemini on millions of copyrighted books without authorization and then altering copyright metadata to conceal it. Publishing Perspectives has a detailed breakdown, including internal Google documents cited in the complaint that estimate the potential liability at tens of billions of dollars. If you work in publishing, journalism, or any field where your written work could end up in an AI training set, this one is worth following closely.
ChatGPT went down and people definitely noticed
On July 14, ChatGPT experienced a broad outage affecting login and core features, with user reports peaking above 10,000 on Downdetector. "ChatGPT down" shot to the top of UK search trends almost immediately. The service was back within hours, but the speed and volume of the reaction says something about how embedded these tools have become in people's daily work routines.
DeepSeek is preparing to go public
Bloomberg reported Monday that DeepSeek is in early preparations for a mainland China IPO, potentially filing later this year. The Chinese AI lab is targeting a valuation around $71 billion and recently closed a $7 billion private funding round. A public listing would be a landmark event for China's AI sector and would bring a level of financial scrutiny that makes it much easier to compare DeepSeek's actual scale and trajectory against OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.