All posts tagged: Google

A Chaotic Week at OpenAI

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In many ways, this story is just beginning. Illustration by The Atlantic. Source Jim Wilson / The New York Times / Redux. November 22, 2023, 2:01 PM ET This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here. It’s been an unbelievable few days for OpenAI, the influential company behind products such as ChatGPT, the image-generating DALL-E, and GPT-4. On Friday, its CEO, Sam Altman, was suddenly fired by the company’s board. Chaos immediately followed: A majority of the company’s workers revolted, negotiations were held, and now a new agreement has been reached to return Altman to his throne. It’s a tale of corporate mutiny fit for streaming, and we’ve been following it closely at The Atlantic. The turmoil at OpenAI is juicy, yes, but it is not just gossip: Whatever happens here will be of major consequence to the future of AI development. This is a company that has been at odds with itself …

Google Meet can now detect when you raise your hand IRL

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Google launched its hand gesture detection feature on Google Meet that recognizes when your physical hand is raised and triggers the hand raise icon to notify participants in the video call that you have a question. The AI-powered feature was initially announced back in March. Google Meet only detects your hand when it is visible to the camera and must be away from your face and body, the company explains in its recent blog post. You may have to keep your hand up for a few seconds until the gesture detection is triggered. The hand raise icon will appear in your video window, and then you’ll be moved to the main grid so moderators can see that you’re requesting to speak. Image Credits: Google Available across most Google Meet Workspace plans, the gesture detection feature is off by default but can be enabled in settings. It’s automatically turned off for active speakers, most likely to prevent people from enabling the hand raise icon every time they wave around their hands when talking. The new feature …

Google admits Spotify pays no Play Store fees because of a secret deal

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A Google executive said during a testimony in the Epic vs Google trial that a deal with Spotify allows the audio company to bypass Play Store fees, as reported by The Verge. Don Harrison, Google’s head of partnership, said that Spotify pays no fees when it processes its own payments and pays a measly 4% fee when Google processes them, the publication noted. He also said that both companies have committed to put $50 million each in a “success fund.” The details surfaced today after Google requested the court to keep the specifics of its deal with Spotify sealed earlier in the month. Google typically takes a 15% cut on subscription apps. This fee could be reduced to 11% due to programs like user choice billing, which allows developers to use their own or third-party payment solutions. “A small number of developers that invest more directly in Android and Play may have different service fees as part of a broader partnership that includes substantial financial investments and product integrations across different form factors. These key …

OpenAI fires CEO Sam Altman, Airbnb acquires GamePlanner.AI, and Epic battles Google over antitrust

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Howdy, folks, and welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s newsletter that recaps the major tech industry happenings over the past week (or so). Microsoft’s Ignite conference, where the tech giant pitched its vision of a “copilot”-powered future, flooded the channels midweek. But there was plenty of note besides. In this edition of WiR, we take a look at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s unexpected firing, Humane’s strange — and perhaps overambitious — Ai Pin, the shutdown of the popular video chat service Omegle, Airbnb acquiring the secret firm of a Siri co-founder, and Amazon launching a discounted health plan. We also cover the watermelon emoji being used as a symbol of political unity on social media, electric air taxi testing in New York City, the ongoing Epic-Google antitrust case and driverless car company Cruise’s worsening woes. It’s a lot to get to — so let’s hop to it. But first, a reminder to sign up here to receive WiR in your inbox every Saturday if you haven’t already done so. Most read OpenAI CEO Sam Altman fired: …

Don’t be fooled by the AI apocalypse

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A guide to understanding which fears are real and which aren’t Illustration by The Atlantic November 16, 2023, 2:14 PM ET This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. Sign up here. Executive action, summits, big-time legislation—governments around the world are beginning to take seriously the threats AI could pose to society. As they do, two visions of the technology are jostling for the attention of world leaders, business magnates, media, and the public. One sounds like science fiction, in which rogue robots extinguish humanity or terrorists use AI to accomplish the same. You aren’t alone if you fear the coming of Skynet: The executives at the helm of the very companies developing this supposedly terrifying technology—at OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and elsewhere—are the ones sounding the alarm that their products could end the world, and efforts to regulate AI in the U.S. and the U.K. are already parroting those prophecies. But many advocates and academics say …

AWS, Microsoft, Google and Oracle partner to make cloud spend more transparent

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As enterprises move to the cloud, figuring out how and where they are spending their money has become increasingly difficult. The different SaaS provider and cloud platforms use their own definitions for how they report what these companies spend. On top of that, they then make that data available in different formats, too. All of this has given rise to FinOps, a new practice that aims to bring more accountability to cloud spend. The FinOps Foundation today announced the first preview of its foundational project: the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS). The companies involved here include companies that you would typically consider competitors, including AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle Cloud, IBM, Meta, VMware and large cloud users like Walmart and Capital One, as well as service providers like Atlassian, Twilio, Datadog and Snowflake. The fact that these companies are working together on creating this spec goes to show how pervasive this problem is. “We are establishing FOCUS as the cornerstone lexicon of FinOps by providing an open-source, vendor-agnostic specification featuring a unified schema and …

Google Maps gets more social with a new feature to help you plan outings with your friends

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Google Maps is getting a few new updates, including a social feature that is designed to help people plan and collaborate with their friends. The navigation platform is also adding improved transit directions and emoji reactions. The new social feature is designed to take planning out of your group chat and into Google Maps. The platform is updating its list feature to make it easier for people to share places, plan with friends and vote on group activities. With this new feature, you’ll be able to create a collaborative list to to start planning a hangout after you share a place in Maps with friends. Everyone in the group can add places they’re interested in visiting, and vote with an emoji, like a heart or a thumbs down. Image Credits: Google Google says the new feature will allow users to plan an outing from start to finish right in the Maps app. For instance, you can invite your friends to collaborate on a list to decide on all of the activities you want to do this …

Google Photos turns to AI to organize and categorize your photos for you

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Google Photos is rolling out a set of new features today that will leverage AI technologies to better organize and categorize photos for you. With the addition of something called Photo Stacks, Google will use AI to identify the “best” photo from a group of photos taken together and select it as the top pick of the stack to reduce clutter in your Photos gallery. Another AI-powered feature will identify photos of things like screenshots and documents, categorize them and even allow you to set reminders on those images to find them at a later date — like a screenshot of an event ticket with a QR code you’ll need for entry, for example. The company says that with Photo Stacks, users will be able to select their own photo as the top pick if they choose or turn off the feature entirely. But if they leave the feature enabled, Google Photos will automatically organize your gallery for you so that multiple photos of the same moment will be hidden behind the top pick of …

More from the US v Google trial: vertical search, pre-installs and the case of Firefox/Yahoo

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We’re nearly two months into the Justice Department’s landmark antitrust case against Google — one of the biggest fights in tech antitrust since the U.S. took Microsoft to trial in the 1990s — and the revelations just keep getting juicier. In our last roundup, we learned how Google spent $26.3 billion in 2021 making itself the default search engine across platforms and how Google tried to have Chrome preinstalled on iPhones. Over the past couple of weeks, more of the inner workings of Google has come to light, including some of the search engine’s most lucrative search queries, what the revenue-share agreements between Google and Android OEMs look like and why Expedia has a bone to pick with Google. Before we go into some of these tidbits… Why the Google vs. U.S. antitrust case matters The government has argued that Google uses its platforms and deals with partners to block out any competition in search or advertising, thus hindering competitors from accessing the data they’d need to improve their products. If Judge Amit Mehta rules …

Generative AI is confusing Google

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This technology won’t be contained. Illustration by The Atlantic November 9, 2023, 1:12 PM ET This is Atlantic Intelligence, an eight-week series in which The Atlantic’s leading thinkers on AI will help you understand the complexity and opportunities of this groundbreaking technology. (Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here.) Earlier this week, I asked ChatGPT how to clean a humidifier. Then, frustrated by its answer, I asked it to design a less demanding humidifier. It did. But when I prompted the AI to estimate the cost of such a device—a few hundred dollars on the high end—I decided to live with the 30-minute white-vinegar soak it had suggested in the first place. The whole experience was quick, easy, and had the pleasant tickle of ingenuity: I felt like I’d participated in a creative process, rather than just looking something up. The problem, though, is that I never feel like I can trust a chatbot’s output. They are prone to making things up and garbling facts. Those flaws are bad enough in the context …