Pixel 11 Pro XL vs. iPhone 17 Pro Max: I Compared Google and Apple’s Flagship Phones

For the last few years, Google’s Pixel has been a showcase of new AI features, with few hardware changes from the previous year’s devices. Similarly, the Pixel 11 series isn’t too different in design and internals from its predecessor. However, this year’s devices have more Gemini features to complete tasks in the background, including a new Wispr Flow-like transcription feature, a live translation feature that works across content, and a new camera feature that captures the right frames. Image Credits:Google AI advances on the Pixel 11 With this year’s Pixel 11 series launch, Google is thinking more agentic AI to complete your tasks. With Gemini, U.S.-based users will be able to order groceries, book rides, or get coffee, for instance. Plus, Gemini can call businesses on users’ behalf for table reservations or appointments. Google said that users can take over or stop tasks at any point in time and also review transcripts for AI-operated calls. The company has also evolved the “Magic Cue” feature from last year to use Gemini, which proactively surfaces contextual information, to now display information from across your apps to help you find suggestions for things like a dinner spot or show. In May, Google announced a dictation product called Rambler to take on competitors like Wispr Flow and Aqua. Now, that product is making its way to the Pixel phones. The new Pixel series phones have some other helpful features that might be handy for daily usage, too. First, the device can translate videos, podcasts, and voice messages in the target language. The company is also making its “Circle to Search” gesture-based feature available directly in the camera, something that Apple also did in iOS 27 by making Siri available in the camera. What’s more, Google is adding an accessibility feature to the camera, which uses Gemini to translate sign language into text to help people communicate with others who have hearing impairments. And the company has redesigned the live transcribe interface for improved communication. Camera features Google also added a few AI tricks embedded into its camera. One feature is called “Magic Capture,” which picks the best frames out of hundreds of frames it captures between when users press start and end. The idea is to take a video and get photos as a byproduct. Google said that the feature also auto-crops and unblurs the frames to make them ready for sharing. The company has upgraded its super zoom from 100x to 120x for Pro phones, and from 20x to 30x for the base Pixel 11. With the new devices, users will be able to create custom looks for the camera, which are specialized filters that appear when users are snapping images. Image Credits:Google The Pro phones are also getting faster capture with a feature called “Instant Night Sight,” which takes 4.5x less time than the previous-gen phone’s Night Sight. Google enhanced video shooting, too, with support for 8K resolution with video boost and better stability. For creators, Google added a “creator suite” mode in video settings, which lets you use Pixel 11 devices as a teleprompter while shooting clips. When you are done shooting, the clip is saved in a dedicated folder, making it easier to find for editing. Hardware upgrades All the Pixel phones now run the latest Tensor G6 processor, which has 20% better power efficiency and allows for 25% faster browsing, as per Google. Plus, it lets users take faster low-light photos with Night Sight Instant. The new image signal processing on the chip also enables 120x magic zoom on the Pixel 11 Pro XL. The company said that the new processors run the latest models with lower latency, but didn’t offer any specific metrics. The display size on all phones is the same, but the Pro models get a slightly brighter display, which could be helpful in the daylight. Image Credits: GoogleImage Credits:Google Google said Pro models get an updated main camera sensor that takes higher-quality photos than the previo

The AI industry is having a rogue agent summer. The latest model to escape onto the open internet during security testing is Kimi K3, a powerful open-weight offering from the Chinese company Moonshot AI.Frontier Security, a US startup, says that Kimi K3 went outside of its sandbox while testing its defensive cybersecurity skills. As with incidents previously reported by OpenAI and Anthropic, the escape was partly enabled by a misconfiguration in the sandbox designed to contain it. Frontier claims, though, that the incident shows Kimi has fewer cyber safeguards than most other powerful AI models, something that allowed it to go off and use the internet without express permission.“We found a leak in the sandbox,” says Yaron Singer, CEO of Frontier Security. “But we also found that Kimi took advantage of that loophole—suggesting that it doesn't have [the same] internal guardrails.”Unlike other recent incidents of AI agents going off-script, Kimi K3 did not hack anything after accessing the internet—because the answers to the problems it was seeking were easily attainable on GitHub.Moonshot did not respond to a request for comment by time of publication.The incident is the latest in a string of agent mishaps that suggest increasingly cyber-capable AI models are becoming more challenging to control.Last month, OpenAI disclosed that an unreleased model had broken out onto the internet and then hacked Hugging Face, a company that hosts AI models and data, in order to find answers to problems it was tasked with solving. OpenAI subsequently shared that its AI agents had in fact hacked into four additional services as part of the spree.Shortly after OpenAI reported its incident, Anthropic revealed that several of its models had also gained access to the internet and attacked outside systems. Last week, the AISI also disclosed that in its own testing, versions of OpenAI and Anthropic models that had security safeguards disabled perpetrated multiple hacks across the internet, including a particularly ambitious attempt by Anthropic’s Mythos 5 to plant malicious code in an open-source project on GitHub.While these AI hacking episodes all vary in both cause and degree, the Kimi K3 is similar to several of them in that a misconfigured sandbox allowed access to a number of websites rather than keeping it contained to a simulated environment. The model was expressly tasked with solving problems that should not have involved going off to find the answers online, and appears to have gone outside of those instructions. The model had to figure out for itself that it had access to certain websites by probing the network settings of the sandbox.While human error appears to have played a major role in each of the breakouts, the consequences have been compounded by the fact that advanced AI models are designed to use reason and take complex actions in order to solve problems.Another key difference between previous incidents and the one discovered by Frontier Security is that it involves a model that is already widely available, with the same safeguards an average user would encounter.“Kimi K3 is very good at following a goal by any means necessary and also doesn't have the guardrails to prevent it from cheating or escaping the sandbox,” says Paul Kassianik, a researcher at Frontier Security.Kassianik and Singer both say that Kimi and other open-weight models are also excellent tools for cybersecurity defense. (Hugging Face ultimately used an unnamed AI model from China to defend itself against the OpenAI agent hack.) Their company has developed benchmarks that measure a model’s capacity to find vulnerabilities in software and networks, which show that Kimi excels at these tasks.The sandbox tested by Frontier Security was developed by the UK government’s AI Security Institute (AISI) for testing AI systems. AISI did not respond to a request for comment by time of posting.Some cybersecurity experts say the issue discovered by Frontier Security reinforces

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