Those internet daydreams about buying a home in the country might take on a new element of realism, courtesy of an experimental AI-infused graphics technique.

Zillow is turning drone photography into immersive aerial views of homes on its platform through a combination of AI and a goofily named visual rendering method called “3D Gaussian splatting” that’s more commonly used in video game development.

“Imagine being able to spin around the exterior of the home, going up and down in elevation, going in and out in proximity to the home,” Zillow CTO David Beitel told Tech Brew. “The AI models take that drone footage and then build the internal structures and computer vision models to allow that to be realized within our app and our website.”

Simple math: It’s the kind of visual machine learning capability that Zillow has built much of its AI chops around—that and its famous Zestimate market value calculator.

• Before ChatGPT made AI a permanent fixture in business headlines, Zillow had assembled a research team laser-focused on letting people virtually immerse themselves in far-flung properties, inside and out, through their phone or computer screens.

Now, like virtually every other company, Zillow has its sights set on generative AI. The guiding mission is to move Zillow from a home listings directory to a platform that aids in every step of complicated real estate transactions, Beitel said.

The stack: Zillow has started exploring GenAI features like AI-powered FAQs for each property on its StreetEasy platform, personalized AI-generated intro messages between shoppers and agents on StreetEasy, and AI call summaries for agents to recollect previous interactions with a customer.

In addition to Zillow’s proprietary models, Beitel said the company works with most major model providers, as well as enterprise tools like Glean—for internal AI search—and Cursor and Claude Code for coding assistance.

Keep reading here.—PK

Weeks before a group of General Motors engineers were set to test the limits of an electric Chevrolet Silverado’s battery, the goalposts moved.

Starting last fall, the group had been planning a challenge for the 2026 Chevy Silverado EV Max Range Work Truck. They wanted to see just how far they could drive on a single charge. But the world record they’d been eyeing suddenly jumped after EV startup Lucid achieved the Guinness World Record for the longest trip by an EV on a single charge: 749 miles.

“When, just a couple of weeks before we started the test, Lucid broke that record and hit 749, we kinda were a little bit nervous about it,” Jon Doremus, engineering manager for EV propulsion calibration at GM, told Tech Brew.

They needn’t have worried; the GM team would go on to shatter that record with a 1,059.2-mile run.

How it started: The test began as a passion project among GM engineers who plotted ways to make the vehicle, which clocks in with an EPA-estimated range of 493 miles, as efficient as possible.

Keep reading here.—JG

Agentic AI in the workplace is changing how people do their jobs—and changing what’s expected.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it depends on how the changes are applied, as Appfire CTO Ed Frederici told IT Brew. Appfire prefers a human-centric approach, Frederici said, but that’s not necessarily true across the industry. Some tech leaders are using the implementation of agents to avoid giving the real reason for layoffs.

“We had a long period of time where companies overhired and overstaffed and put themselves in a position where their cost model was untenable, and you see a correction occurring as they let people go,” Frederici explained. “It’s a convenient way for companies to kind of hide the fact that they made poor hiring decisions.”

Keep reading IT Brew’s coverage of AI in the workplace here.—EH