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Google Pushes Gemini 3 Pro Into Search And The Gemini App
The new model lands a few weeks before Gemini 2’s first birthday and brings a task-running agent to the Gemini app.
Google has pushed Gemini 3 Pro across its consumer and developer platforms, dropping the model into the Gemini app, Google Search’s AI Mode and other products across the company’s cloud stack in a single sweep.
In the app, the model sits behind the “Thinking” option and is open to all users, with higher limits for paid tiers. Answers are reported to be tighter and better structured. More importantly, it unlocks Gemini Agent, a task-runner built on last year’s Project Mariner. Once granted access to Google apps, it can handle chores directly — managing email instead of just suggesting how.
Search has also received a major upgrade. Gemini 3 Pro goes live first for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers inside AI Mode and will also power AI Overviews for the hardest queries. A new routing system (due soon), will decide when a question is sent to the upgraded model. For now, subscribers can trigger it by selecting “Thinking” in AI Mode.
Google argues the model strengthens the “fan-out” technique behind AI Mode by running broader, deeper searches and surfacing material earlier versions overlooked. Better multimodal analysis should also produce more functional answers; researching personal loans, for example, could return an embedded calculator rather than a wall of text.
The company is leaning on benchmark gains to anchor the launch. On benchmarking platform Humanity’s Last Exam, the model hit 37.5 percent accuracy, topping Grok 4 by 12.1 points without using web search. It also leads the LMArena board with 1,501 points.
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Developers get the same upgrades too: Gemini 3 Pro is now in the Gemini API, AI Studio and Vertex AI. Google is also adding Antigravity, an autonomous coding tool that writes software while generating its own subtasks and progress notes. Gemini 3 Deep Think, a higher-end reasoning mode, will reach safety testers first before moving to AI Ultra users.
For MENA firms already prototyping with Google models, the rollout offers quicker access to production-grade assistants and coding agents as competition between global AI platforms tightens.
News
Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon
Foreign visitors will be the first users to benefit, but whether Syria’s own banks and cardholders follow is still an open question.
Visa is returning to Syria. Its first live international card transaction in the country was a test rather than a launch, and the milestone event ran through a Lebanese bank.
The acquirer (the bank on the merchant’s side of a card payment) was Fransabank Lebanon, with Paymera as the other named partner. Nadim Moujaes, who heads a Fransabank Group subsidiary, describes the test as both the culmination of “longstanding efforts to link Syria back to international payment networks” and “the first step in a larger path”.
Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa makes the first electronic payment in Syria using a @Visa card at a store in Damascus, following the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. pic.twitter.com/lpAN7nQ6Fc
— Tech Magazine (@TechMGZN) August 27, 2026
“We are excited to have successfully tested live transactions today as we plan to enable international visitors to use their Visa cards while in Syria,” says Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president and group country manager for the North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. Although a significant first step, that plan doesn’t come with a hard date for when a visitor’s card will work normally.
Mohammed Safwat Raslan, governor of the Central Bank of Syria, says the test paves the way for international card acceptance in Syria and that maintaining strong compliance, risk management and operational controls will remain essential. Serhan likewise stresses that Visa has worked within applicable legal, regulatory and compliance requirements. For a test transaction, it seems there was a great deal of attention paid to the rules, with the entire operation being carefully managed.
Also Read: Lebanon’s 5G Era Begins With 150 Stations And A $1M Budget
The test is the latest step in a sequence that began in December 2025, when Visa announced a strategic roadmap to support Syria’s integration into the global digital economy. In February 2026 it hosted its first industry gathering of banks, ecosystem partners and policymakers in Damascus and, the same month, signed an agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in San Francisco.
Michel Kattouah, Paymera’s CEO, called the test “the return of international card acceptance,” but while that’s positive news, there’s no word yet on when a Syrian bank will issue a Visa card to a Syrian customer.
Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon
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