Apple has become the first Big Tech company to be charged with breaking the European Union’s new digital markets rules, three days after the tech giant said it would not release artificial intelligence in the bloc due to regulation. On Monday, the European Commission said that Apple’s App Store was …
Read More »Before Smartphones, an Army of Real People Helped You Find Stuff on Google
The Eiffel Tower is 330 meters tall, and the nearest pizza parlor is 1.3 miles from my house. These facts were astoundingly easy to ascertain. All I had to do was type some words into Google, and I didn’t even have to spell them right. For the vast majority of …
Read More »Big Tech Is Giving Campaigns Both the Venom and the Antidote for GenAI
The Biden campaign is facing its first major cheapfake scandal this week. Doctored clips of Biden at the G7 Summit and a Hollywood fundraiser have spread across platforms like X, claiming to show Biden wandering off, mumbling unintelligibly, or, uh, even pooping his pants. It’s exactly the type of content …
Read More »Good Search Borrows, Great Search … Steals?
Web crawling—the act of indexing information across the internet—has been around for decades. It has primarily been used by search engines like Google and nonprofits like Internet Archive and Common Crawl to catalog the contents of the open internet and make it searchable. Until recently, the practice of web crawling …
Read More »STEM Students Refuse to Work at Google and Amazon Over Project Nimbus
More than 1,100 self-identified STEM students and young workers from more than 120 universities have signed a pledge to not take jobs or internships at Google or Amazon until the companies end their involvement in Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract providing cloud computing services and infrastructure to the Israeli …
Read More »AI Is Coming for Big Tech Jobs—but Not in the Way You Think
Aaron Damigos’ inbox was hit with a dreaded, ubiquitous business-update calendar invite on June 3. The meeting included someone from HR, his manager, and upper management—and ultimately resulted in the sudden end to his job as a web support associate with Microsoft. Microsoft reportedly laid off some 1,000 people in …
Read More »As Google Targets AI Search Ads, It Could Learn a Lot From Bing
For years Paula Thompson, vice president of client strategy at the US digital ad agency Optimal, has been helping Plunge sell baths to soak in chilling water by buying ads on Google search and Microsoft Bing. The ads appear atop results for searches such as “ice bath” and invite users …
Read More »Things Keep Getting Worse for the Humane Ai Pin
It has not been a great year for the Humane Ai pin. Pitched to the world as an AI-infused hologram-projecting phone replacement you could stick on your lapel, the wearable pin instead turned out to be a sad, bad little device. After months of hype, the Pin was finally released …
Read More »Google’s and Microsoft’s AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election
Microsoft’s and Google’s AI-powered chatbots are refusing to confirm that President Joe Biden beat former president Donald Trump in the 2020 US presidential election. When asked “Who won the 2020 US presidential election?” Microsoft’s chatbot Copilot, which is based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model, responds by saying: “Looks like …
Read More »US National Security Experts Warn AI Giants Aren't Doing Enough to Protect Their Secrets
Last year, the White House struck a landmark safety deal with AI developers that saw companies including Google and OpenAI promise to consider what could go wrong when they create software like that behind ChatGPT. Now a former domestic policy adviser to President Biden who helped forge that deal says …
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