The tech news singularity approaches. That's just where companies shove more and more AI into basic everyday objects until literally
every topic qualifies as tech on some level, and I don't know, sounds great to me.
Google held its IO event today to detail its ongoing plans to put generative AI in absolutely
everything, starting with the public rollout of Gemini-infused Google search results.
Your grandma's going to be using this. Prepare yourself. The tech giant says they want to start by providing AI curated results and AI overview
summaries to users looking for inspiration, like those making open-ended requests for date ideas,
to which the only acceptable answer is Casa Bonita in Denver, Colorado.
Either she gets it or she's not worth it. If you search date ideas, you'll get one answer every time.
The company did, however, throw one bone to skeptics of the direction Google search has
taken over the last few decades. Last few decades.
The company did, however, throw one bone to skeptics of the direction Google search has
taken over the last few decades, a dedicated web search tab that filters out Google's various
widgets and doodads, leaving just text-based results.
I'm getting sad here. Google also announced several updates to its stable of AI models.
Gemini 1.5 Pro is now available to all developers with up to a 2 million token context window.
Gemini Nano now has multimodal capabilities that allow it to take images, audio and video as input,
and they've added a faster lower latency model, Gemini 1.5 Flash.
Google has also integrated Gemini as a panel on the side of most of its workplace suite,
which can be toggled on or off. Thank you so much, Google.
Plus, they've added an AI teammate intended to act as a kind of productivity buddy,
tracking tasks and coordinating communications with co-workers.
You can even personalize it and give it its own name. I've named mine Jacob after our writer Jacob,
which is only a problem when I get Jacob and Jacob confused. Are you talking to me?
Looks like they're in the room now. As for more visual AI stuff, there's the even better text-to-image model,
Imagine 3, that's how they say it, even though it should be Imogen.
Moving on. And Google DeepMind's Vio, a generative video model that looks like Google's fairly impressive
answer to open AI's Sora. The question of whether this was straight on YouTube videos should be obvious.
It'll be available to a few creators through the new VideoFX tool,
and it comes integrated with Google's AI watermarking system,
SynthID, which now works with video and could be built into YouTube one day.
Another big maybe is Project Astra, which Google described as
our vision for the future of AI assistance that can perceive live video and audio
and answer in real time. And we think it's so cool that they want that.
Have you made it yet? Cause why are you showing it, otherwise?
What if this existed? Yeah, that would be cool.
Cool idea, Google.
That's awesome, Google. CEO Sundar Pichai also hyped up DeepMind's Alpha Fold 3,
the revolutionary protein structure prediction tool that can do the same thing for all sorts
of different molecules now. And finally, Google announced a grab bag of AI-adjacent accessibility features for Android.
There's one that can monitor phone calls live and flag whether they are likely to be scams,
one that describes images for visually impaired users, and another that allows users to control a cursor with their head and face.
Of course, Apple also recently announced a similar eye-tracking accessibility feature.
And besides, you could already control your phone with your face.
You just gotta get real close. So that was, uh, you just get close enough and then you can do anything you want.
I use my tongue personally. In other AI news, Ilya Sutskiver, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist,
has suddenly left the company for reasons unknown,
though he indicated that he was excited about vague future plans that he would
outline at some later point. Once he gets the chat GPT summary of it.
Only a few hours later, Jan Leike, co-leader of OpenAI's super alignment group,
announced that he was leaving the company as well, tweeting just two words,
I resigned. Bit abrupt. OpenAI has seen several similar high-profile departures within the last few months,
including four researchers, their head of non-profit and strategic initiatives,
and their VP of people. Whatever the heck that is.
Do they have a VP of non-people? That's every other VP.
VP of staplers. He's got his own office. At least one of the researchers stated that he didn't trust the company to
behave responsibly around the creation of artificial general intelligence.
OpenAI's internal culture appears to be significantly out of step with public
sentiment on this issue, as a recent YouGov survey found that 63% of Americans would support government
legislation to prevent the creation of super intelligent AI.
Sam Altman was apparently one of the few who watched Terminator and The Matrix
and thought, hell yeah, sick. That's what I'm talking about.
I hate the billet, John Connor.
Taking immediate action earlier today, the US Senate revealed a $32 billion a year roadmap for regulating AI,
which makes no concrete suggestions for how to regulate AI.
We're very much in the creating a committee to develop a framework for considering legislation
stage of the regulatory process, and that part's important.
Plus, that annual $32 billion is primarily intended for investment in non-military AI
innovation, so apparently we're going to regulate Sam Altman by giving him money.
More AI? A2?
Quick bits? Apple's newest 17.5 iOS update appears to be causing old long-deleted photos,
including nudes, to reappear in users' photo albums, as if they were recent photos.
You don't want that. Dozens of users have reported encountering this issue,
including on devices that were previously wiped. To be clear, this doesn't necessarily mean that Apple has secretly been holding on to supposedly
deleted data. Old deleted data isn't really gone-gone until it's been overwritten by something else,
which is probably how the i-necromancers at Apple accidentally brought a bunch of elderly
dick pics back from the grave. The pics are elderly.
I don't know about the dicks.
Leaked internal documents from Dell show an extremely bullish attitude towards
Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon X Elite chips, which are set to launch imminently.
Dell apparently already expects to include second-gen Snapdragon X Elite chips in its
2026 laptop lineup, as well as a third generation for either 2027 or 2028,
depending on whether the AI has gotten us all by then.
These second-gen chips are expected to be even more efficient than their already
super-efficient predecessors, cutting the power draw of Dell's 2026 laptops down to 20W from
25.5W. ASUS is only scheduled to announce its own Snapdragon X Elite-based laptop on Monday,
so this is a bit like checking your parents' closet for your birthday present,
only to find several years' worth of future birthday presents.
And now everything's been ruined. There's no surprise.
Socks? 2030? Really? A federal investigation of Alphabet subsidiary Waymo is underway due to the company's self-driving
cars being involved in a lot of crashes. Waymo crashes than necessary.
Anyway, investigators have found 22 incidents where Waymo's cars collided with objects like
gates, chains, and parked cars. Meanwhile, automakers as a whole have been put on notice
by the FTC to stop selling connected cars that illegally collect users' data.
That sounded really scary until the FTC revealed this issue has been on their radar for years.
Nissan and Kia's privacy policies allow them to track your sexual activity,
and the FTC is just watching. Gross. It was in the terms.
New York City will be testing AI-enabled gun scanners from a company called Evolve
in its subway system, with Mayor Eric Adams saying an analysis of the scanner's accuracy
will be conducted, even though the city already tested Evolve scanners two years ago.
That test revealed the scanner's detections were actually false positives 85% of the time.
Another 14% of detections were cops. You'd think that math that disappointing would mean
something to the education system, but apparently several U.S. states are still considering putting
similar scanners in schools. It wouldn't be the first time a school gave a passing grade to an
underperformer, but that's usually reserved for star athletes who actually put points on the board.
We gotta make it a championship this year! And TikTok is including chat GPT-generated
answers to some of its search results in a test to see just how deeply they can confuse the youth.
The app does warn users that AI smart search could get things wrong, but TikTok users should be
used to that. Last September, the app tested supplementing its search results with links to
Google, Wikipedia, IMDb, and other websites, since many young people treat TikTok as a search engine,
and may not know there's a whole internet out there that isn't based on only
fans' funnel accounts and confident misinformation. Or at least, there used to be.
There also used to be more tech news every Friday. And guess what? There still is. I'll see you then.